LITTLE WILSON AND BIG GOD

As far as acknowledgments of help are concerned, I have none to make. These memoirs, which chronicle my life from birth to the age of forty-two, are pure memories, unratified by the reminiscences of others or by documents other than maps and Sir Richard Winstedt’s remarkable English–Malay Dictionary (Singapore, 1952). Memories sometimes lie in relation to facts, but facts also lie in respect of memory. Sometimes a photograph, which pretends to record fact but in fact does not (fact cannot be removed from time and frozen into space), can at least seem to tell a truth more pungently than words, and I regret that, unlike many autobiographies, this has no supplement of visual records. When I lived in the Far East from 1954 until 1959, termites and damp heat destroyed any photographs I had of my family or own early life. The same has to be said of letters, school and army reports, newspaper clippings and the like. I know that the human brain is an inadequate storage and retrieval system, and I trust my own little, but still I trust it.

This first volume of what, following St Augustine and Rousseau, I call my Confessions – without the promise of such basic spiritual revelations as they provide – is longer than I intended, and I foresee that the projected second and last volume – whose title will probably be You’ve Had Your Time – will be as long, if not longer. The delineation of oneself at such length must look like egocentricity, but an autobiography has to be egocentric. On the other hand, what do we mean by the ego? It is an existential concept, I believe, and the ego I examine is multiple and somewhat different from the ego that is doing the examining. Even the ego that began the book in September 1985 is not the one that has completed it in 1986. In other words, the book is about somebody else, connected by the ligature of a common track in time and space to the writer of this last segment of it, which cheats and looks like the first.

I write about this somebody else because I think he may stand for a great number of my generation – those who were dimly aware of the muddled ethos of the twenties, were uneasy in the thirties, served their country in the forties, and had some difficulty in coming to terms with the postwar world – the peace or prolonged truce that is still with us. He may stand also, but far more so in the as yet unwritten second volume, for those who have tried to earn a living from writing. And, as a Catholic of the North of England with Irish blood, he may stand for many who are termed English but have always had a dubious relation with their country of birth. In other words, this is allegory in the original Greek sense of ‘speaking otherwise’, presenting others in the shape of myself.

Death too. There were several New Yorkers who had caught salvatory flights out of Mexico City, which had been devastated by a series of earthquakes. Their interpretation of Mexico’s woe was mostly financial. ‘This,’ said an evident tycoon, ‘is their coo de grass.’ What Thomas Malthus called natural checks were at their inadequate work, trying to defuse the demographic explosion. Besides earthquakes there was an ailment called Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome, busy in those New York bathhouses where male homosexuals revelled in promiscuity. It had also been a bad year for air disasters. I was shortly – after five hours of idleness – to fly to London by British Airways, and statistically, having clocked up too many thousands of air miles, I was due at least to think it possible that I might die over or in the Atlantic. It was proper to think of death.

It is always proper to think of death, especially when one is a year or so off seventy. I had, a few days before, met young people in Minneapolis who were surprised to find me still alive. They had studied a book of mine in high school or college and assumed I was a classical author, meaning a dead one. But there I was, loud and smoking Schimmelpennincks, absurd in the British manner but clearly vigorous. I had given a lecture on the sin of censorship to honour the first centennial of the Minneapolis Public Library. I had also just published two books – my twenty-eighth novel and a short study of D. H. Lawrence, who had also, the day before my lecture, accomplished his first centenary. I was at work still, but I could see that I was fast sliding into the past. A large number of tattered paperbacks dating from the 1960s were brought for my signature. A week before in London a Canadian academic had approached me with a view to writing my biography. In New York I had received the same proposal from a well-regarded literary hack. Both men assumed, touchingly, that there was a life to write about. At my age, they supposed, there had to be. But they had no doubt that I belonged to the past and, with luck, my death might occur before they reached the last chapter. They had better get their facts straight from the subject before he joined the ultimate idleness.

Sitting idly in the Plaza vestibule, I considered that it might be a reasonable idea to pre-empt the work of these two would-be biographers. I might not necessarily do it better nor even more truthfully, but it would be easier to transfer my life to my own paper than to theirs. As for truth, I might, through sheer shame at the banality of my life, be forced to distort it more than they. But Pontius Pilate’s question has still not been properly answered, though he may well have given the only possible answer with his other great dictum: ‘What I have written I have written.’ He is surely the patron saint of writers (I accept the story of his ultimate conversion). He even had the writer’s gift of choosing an infelicitous time for important utterances. The truth is fabled by the daughters of memory. It is also a variable commodity. Neapolitans in courts of law know this, for they earnestly ask their judges which kind of truth they want. The vera verità is the only variety unavailable. God holds possession of that, though God knows what he does with it.

Is a negative motive, the desire to pre-empt, sufficient to fire the writing of an autobiography? It is the way of modesty, for, whatever value the biographer puts on his subject, nobody ought to think that he is worth writing about. This is especially true of professional writers. They are not remarkable people, and if they are novelists they are particularly lacking in interest. The novelist siphons his inner life into the work he has already published; his outer life may be summed up in the image of a man at a desk. The career of a taxi-driver or window-cleaner is far fuller of incident. But, since he is a human being, he is not unqualified to have his life set forth. As an allegory of all men’s lives it may serve to reassure, comfort, thwart ambition, reconcile the reader to the pain and frustration he has previously believed were reserved for him alone. Few lives record large triumphs. Most are memorable for misery. Any life will serve as a type of all lives. The autobiographer can see himself as the only true historian in the sense that he is presenting the life of perennial humanity. In the narrower sense he provides the raw material for the social historian, demonstrating what it was like to be imprisoned in a particular segment of time.

The professional novelist will sometimes have a sly and perhaps unworthy reason for writing about himself. In a fallow time, when he does not have the energy to invent, he will be glad to fall back on reminiscence, though recognising that it is difficult to draw a boundary between the remembered and the imagined. Finding no other food, he becomes autophagous. An autobiography may be a substitute for the novel that cannot be written. Sitting in the Plaza vestibule, I thought about the novel I had spent the past year trying to compose. My last act before leaving home for America had been to tear up a hundred and seventy pages of typescript. I had got on to the wrong track, I had researched in vain, the style was wrong, the theme seemed trivial. I was now finishing a promotional tour of a couple of books that American critics did not like. My best work, such as it was, lay in the past. I perhaps had no future. At least two reviewers hinted that I had written enough and should give up writing for golf or gardening. But I have no garden and I sold my golf clubs twenty years ago. All I can do is write.

One goes on writing partly because it is the only available way of earning a living. It is a hard way and highly competitive. My heart drops into my bowels when I enter a bookshop and see how fierce the competition is. But one pushes on because one has to pay bills. There is also a privier reason for pushing on, and that is the hopeless hope that some day that intractable enemy language will yield to the struggle to control it. I am often told that I write badly, and I do not disagree. Even Shakespeare envied this man’s art and that man’s scope. When I hear a journalist like Malcolm Muggeridge praising God because he has mastered the craft of writing, I feel a powerful nausea. It is not a thing to be said. Mastery never comes, and one serves a lifelong apprenticeship. The writer cannot retire from the battle; he dies fighting. This book is another battle.

With my mind made up to write it, I took my taxi to Kennedy. At the check-in desk of the British Airways terminal I encountered a problem that was not new. Linguists would call it a matter of onomastics. What is the name of the man writing this story? The air ticket said one thing, the passport another. Travelling under a false name smells of shady dealings and arouses suspicion in the breasts of airline agents, who are deliberately chosen for their lack of literary knowledge. It is no good explaining that Mark Twain was not Mark Twain and Alberto Moravia is somebody quite different. I have been interrogated by the police at Rome Airport about my double identity, and at Luqa in Malta I was not allowed to board. My passport calls me John Burgess Wilson and my books are written by Anthony Burgess. As Anthony Burgess is the public persona, it is his name that gets on to hotel bills and airline tickets. United States immigration forms insist on first and last names and destroy an explanatory link. They show the carapace of my nominal shrimp, the head and tail I pull off to disclose the soft edible body. I was christened John Burgess Wilson and was confirmed in the name of Anthony. When I published my first novel I was forced to do so in near-diguise. I was an official of the Colonial Office at the time, and it was regarded as improper to publish fiction under one’s own name. Monographs on the adat perpateh of Negri Sembilan were a different matter. So I pulled the cracker of my total name and unfolded the paper hat of Anthony Burgess.

Those who called me Jack are all dead. Those who call me John are getting old. I answer to Anthony and, in Italy, to Antonio. In the United States the digraph th is given the full value of a theta or else elided. Renaissance etymologists, despite the evidence of the Roman origin of the name, liked to believe it derived from the Greek anthos, a flower, and I am stuck with a piece of bad philology. Franco Zeffirelli calls me Tony, which I resent; Anthony, being a confirmation name, never had to accept the erosion of daily use and it must stand unabbreviable. Lord Grade once called me Tone boy, which was too fantastic to be resented. Glad to discard the Wilson, since there were so many Wilsons about in the literary world, I learned that Burgess was doomed to have a connotation of treachery and defection. Careless journalists have sometimes confused Guy with Anthony. I have so far merely demanded a printed apology; soon I may get tough. The name is an international one – Bourgois, Borges, Borghese. Jorge Luis Borges had the kindnesss to say to Paul Theroux in Buenos Aires: ‘Anthony Burgess is good – a very generous man, by the way. We are the same – Borges, Burgess. It’s the same name.’ A concept, that of high citizenship of a burg or borough, united us. Although, in joke, he once called himself the Burgess of Argentina, I have never dared to call myself the Borges of Great Britain.

Burgess was the maiden name of the mother I never knew. Elizabeth Burgess, a dancer and singer, was pleonastically named the Beautiful Belle Burgess on music hall posters. She married a Manchester Wilson but was right to insist that her slightly more distinguished surname get on to my baptismal certificate. There have always been too many plain Wilsons around. Of the Wilsons I belong to there are few historical records, and the family had always to rely on myth. I have always wished to believe that the Jacke Wilson of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was one of the family. He gets into a stage direction of the First Folio, with, in Much Ado About Nothing, ‘Enter Prince, Leonato and Jacke Wilson.’ He was a singer and, as Balthazar, sang ‘Sigh no more, ladies’. A contradictory tradition has a John Wilson as an Elizabethan martyr for unreformed Christianity. He was executed for publicly refusing to acknowledge the Queen as head of the Church. A good many Catholics in Lancashire, that chief stronghold of recusancy, contrived to cling to the practice of the old faith without undue molestation, but my family has never been notable for quietness or discretion. The Wilsons, anyway, were obstinate in their adherence to Rome, and I seem to be their first apostate.

The great English Catholics of the age of toleration, from Cardinal Newman to Graham Greene, have all been converts. A cradle Catholic finds it hard to take them seriously. They missed out on the suffering, never gave a drop of blood to the cause, and yielded not one rood of land to the Henrican expropriators. Until the Emancipation Act of 1829, no British Catholic was permitted higher education. The iron door of the Test Act, which required willingness to take the eucharist in its emasculated Anglican form, shut them from the legislature and the other modes of public service. The converts can look back to a family history graced by the economic rewards of Protestantism and to the advantages of education provided by a Protestant establishment. They converted in a cool time. Families may have bitterly opposed their desertion of the national church – as, to his everlasting pain, with Gerard Manley Hopkins – but the state had ceased to care. The converted Catholics of modern literature seem to be concerned with a different faith from the one I was nurtured in – naively romantic, pedantically scrupulous. Novels like The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, Brideshead Revisited and Sword of Honour falsify the faith by over-dramatising it. Waugh’s fictional Catholicism is too snobbish to be true. It evidently hurt Waugh deeply that his typical fellow-worshipper should be an expatriated Irish labourer and that the typical minister of the Church should be a Maynooth priest with a brogue.

The Emancipation Act was intended to placate the Irish, and the British Catholics benefited from it adventitiously. It came too late to benefit most. The wealthier recusants already sent their sons to foreign universities. Emancipation meant the establishment of Catholic public schools. The older Catholic families have never been properly assimilated into the British way of life. Even Guy Fawkes Day worries firework-buying Catholic parents. Few Catholics can enter the great English cathedrals without unease and even resentment. Catholic patriotism is inevitably imperfect. To fight for England means to fight for a Protestant culture. The monarch seems to preside over a church whose incense is compromise; there is even a detectable whiff of ancient guilt. The English Reformation undoubtedly had to come: it was a gesture of insular rejection of the Continental System, it was a clearing of the ground for the mercantile imperialism of Cromwell. Martyrs like St Thomas More and that uncanonised John Wilson were fools for turning their backs on a necessary historical process, and they had to wait long or indefinitely for their posthumous reward from Rome. They are the idiots of English triumphalism. Nevertheless, that reform came out of concupiscence, cynicism, casuistry and greed. The Church of England began as the morganatic gift of a bleary monarch; it is ending as a cricket club in which nobody knows the rules.

Whatever land the Wilsons originally had they lost. Having no land, achieving no distinction in the public life which was barred to them, they merit the silence of history. All we have is shaky myths told by the fire. They did odd jobs, sang and danced, joined foreign armies and disappeared into Belgium, migrated to Dublin, came back again with Irish wives. There was a regular tradition of marrying into Ireland, which meant often into Irish families that had taken the boat from Queenstown to Liverpool and wandered inland to Manchester. I end up as more of a Celt than an Anglo-Saxon. My father broke the tradition by marrying a Protestant of mainly Scottish ancestry – Lowland, hence Anglo-Saxon – but he married her in church with a Maynooth priest officiating: she converted easily.

My great-grandfather is the first figure to emerge from the mists, though he is misty enough. He served in the British infantry, always spoke of the Rooshians and Prooshians, and swore that the Duke of Wellington, in iron old age, had spoken to him. He also swore that he was the one who, working backstage at the Free Trade Hall when Charles Dickens was giving one of his readings, told the great man that he could have been an ornament to the profession, meaning Manchester melodrama. He ended up with one of those pungent herb shops that no longer exist. My father and his brothers would drop in on their way home from school and say: ‘Please, grandad, can we have a drink of water?’ They were then given draughts of sarsaparilla or dandelion and burdock or even steel wine. There used to be a quip in the Manchester music hall: ‘Ah’ve got blue blood in mah veins, ah ’ave.’ – ‘What der yer think ah’ve got in mahn – dandelion and burdock?’ This would make no sense today.

My grandfather, Jack Wilson, kept a pub in north-east Manchester called the Derby Inn. There was a nominal irony in his being a Catholic landlord. He followed tradition in having an Irish wife – Mary Ann Finnegan from Tipperary. He had a large appetite for traditional Lancashire dishes – hotpot, steak and cowheel pie, Eccles cakes, black puddings. He was pointed at in the street as a man who could ‘ate a tater pie as big as his yed’. I was brought up on the same diet, though I have always found black puddings (balls of fat and blood polished with oil) far too rich for a naturally weak stomach. Some years ago, in a Paris Review interview, I gave my American interlocutor the recipe for Lancashire hotpot. Auberon Waugh, noticing the transcript in the Spectator, found the recipe ‘disgusting’. This expresses a class division as much as a regional one. The dish is made by alternating layers of trimmed best end of neck of mutton with sliced onions and potatoes in a large earthenware dish. Stock is added, and finally oysters. The whole is cooked slowly in an oven and eaten with pickled red cabbage. It was a favourite dish on New Year’s Eve in Lancashire Catholic households – or rather it was taken out of the oven just before the striking of midnight. New Year’s Eve, preceding as it does the Feast of the Circumcision, used to be a day of abstinence. To rush to eat meat as soon as the vigil was over was seen as a jocular flirting with sin, and the New Year hotpot was called the Devil’s Supper.

I have, in the long voyage from childhood to a kind of retirement in a Catholic principality (a sort of homing, really), tackled most of the cuisines of the world, but, as Lin Yu Tang said, we are finally loyal to the food of our youth, and this is perhaps what patriotism means. In exile I can cook dishes like hotpot, meat and potato pie, steak pie with cowheel (a Bolton speciality, as Jeanne Moreau, who has Bolton blood, reminded me). I cannot get Eccles cakes, nor the pork sausages sold by Seymour Meads on Princess Road, Manchester. Graham Greene, exiled in Antibes, feels as I do about the British pork sausage, which the French scorn as a mere ungarlicky boudin. Fish and chips are everywhere now, but they are essentially a Lancashire matter, not even a national one. There are none like those that came out of the huge square seething vats of the Manchester chip-shops. Lancashire used to be famous for shops which provided an instant meal to take home – meat pies with gravy poured in hot from a jug, tripe and cowheels, above all fish and chips. Lancashire housewives worked in the cotton mills, where their delicate fingers were preferred to the clumsier, and more expensive, digits of men. They had no time to cook, except on Sundays, the great day of the roast with potatoes under, rice pudding with a brown skin on, rhubarb and custard. The shops stood in for them.

My grandfather stayed where he was – in the Derby Inn, with the odd trip to Blackpool. He tapped the barrels, removed the bungs and hammered in the vent-peg; he ranged the bottles; he served. His customers had names like Charlie Hetherington, Joe Higginbottom, Alec Warburton, Jim Shufflebottom, Jack Bamber, Albert Preston, Fred Whittle. There was one heavy beer-drinker called Taypot. To these customers my grandfather would tell stories he handed on to my father and thus to me. They were brutal jokes in the Lancashire tradition, much possessed by death and deformity. A man in north-east Manchester visits a friend in south-west Manchester and misses the last tram home. Never mind, says the friend. You can sleep with our kid. The man does so and the following morning is asked if he slept well. Aye, but your kid’s arse isn’t half cold. Has to be, says the friend. He’s been dead three days. There is the tale of the man seen digging a hole in the depths of Boggart Hole Clough. Another man comes along and asks him what the hole is for. For t’girl I’m knocking around with. What, are you going to kill her! Naw, fuck her. Then why the hole? Because, says the digger, she’s a ‘unchback. There was also the grim story of the widow who kept her husband’s ashes and took them as snuff. Why? Bugger was up every other ‘ole of me body when he was alive, he can ’ave these now he’s dead. A gentler story about husbands’ ashes concerned the woman who kept them in an eggtimer. Bugger did no work living so now’s his chance.

The late celebrated poet and self-confessed swingeing reviewer Geoffrey Grigson noticed a volume of my essays and divined a personality behind them. ‘Who,’ he said, ‘could possibly like so coarse and unattractive a character?’ He, son of an Anglican country vicar, was acknowledging an alien culture gruffly subsisting outside the covenant of the Protestant establishment. The coarseness is in the Wilson family, and it is bound to be unattractive to southerners. Southerners, one of whose outposts was Blackpool, were not well regarded in brutish Lancashire. They used cut glass, it was said, and peed in the same pot. To them high tea was half a hard-boiled egg and a bit of lettuce. They spoke lahdy dah. They were all bloody Protestants.

My grandmother was illiterate and had to have the evening newspaper read out to her while she was ironing. My grandfather would often falsify the news – Duke of Clarence nicked for buggery in a back alley, Kaiser’s gunboats halfway up the Irwell, price of ale to be doubled – and would reserve his simpler fantasies for the necrology columns. ‘Tha knows Charlie Hetherington? Well, he’s dead.’ My grandmother would go glory be to God and put down the flatiron to cross herself. Charlie Hetherington would then walk into the pub, alive and ready. ‘Tha knows Jackie Eccles that gets called Taypot? Well, he’s dead.’ Taypot had a stroke that night and got into the obituary columns next day. After that my grandfather gave up his falsifyings.

He rarely used the definite article. ‘Shift cat,’ he would order when it was sitting on his rocking chair. The shifting was never done unkindly. He loved household pets, which would include weasels, ferrets and even a little pig. The little pig he brought back drunk from market (a landlord was always sober on his own premises) and placed in the bed of my sleeping Uncle Jimmy, then five. Jimmy cried when he woke in the dark to the company of an incontinent grunter. There was always a singing bird in the house. When my grandfather and grandmother went to Southport for two days to see the sea, which nobody ever sees at Southport, leaving the pub in the hands of the barman, the hired girl neglected to feed the songster and it died. My grandfather never cared much for any of the hired girls, who were changed like bed linen. They were all stupid and also nitty or chatty. ‘Look at bugger, scratching her bloody nut.’ This delinquent he hit out at smartly, saying: ‘Go on, clear off.’ Her father came to protest, and he was hit out at too.

My grandfather had four sons and no daughters. The eldest, Jack, died recently in his nineties. Jimmy, Billy and my father, Joe, will greet me in purgatory as comparatively young men. Billy had the true Finnegan blood in him, for he fell from a roof drunk. His wake held no promise of resurrection. He had been working as a builder’s labourer, having been dismissed from his post as an undertaker’s assistant. The two stories told of him in this latter connection are probably apocryphal. Preparing a baldheaded body for its coffin, he had been told by the widow that her poor husband was to be buried in his wig. He found difficulty in affixing it. He called up to his employer: ‘Mr Clegg, have you got a bit of glue?’ And then: ‘Never mind. I’ve found a nail.’ He came into a pub, not the Derby Inn, ready to stand drinks all round with a bright sovereign. ‘Where did t’a get that, lad?’ – ‘In the mouth of this Jewish bugger we just coffined.’ – ‘But that’s to pay his fare across river Jordan.’ Billy pocketed his change and said: ‘Bugger’ll have to swim.’

The economic substructure of a lively international culture was, as Marx and Engels had observed, founded on injustice. If the revolution was ever to be fomented in England, Manchester would be the hotbed. I remember a Manchester of frightful slums and hard-headed magnates and cotton brokers gorging red meat in chophouses. It was an ugly town and its proletariat could erupt in ugly violence. The Peterloo massacre was well remembered by my great-grandfather. My family had apparently been concerned with settling as far away from St Peter’s Fields, which became St Peter’s Square, as it could. This meant the north-east. But a walk down Carisbrook Street on to Lathbury Road brought one to Rochdale Road and its intersection with Queen’s Road, great arteries along which rattled the Manchester trams. Rochdale Road led south to Shude Hill, where my father worked. Shude Hill led through Withy Grove to Corporation Street and the Royal Exchange. Then Cross Street carried one to Albert Square and the assertive hideous Town Hall, all neogothic spires and sprockets. Further west, the river Irwell marked the boundary with the city of Salford, and the Irwell flowed into the Manchester Ship Canal, which turned an inland city into a port. ‘Manchester Goods for Manchester Docks’ was the slogan in the Corporation trams. Trafford Park, south of the Canal, held the Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Engineering Works, which helped to bring Soviet Russia into the modern world. East of it was the Manchester United Football Ground and, east again, the cricket ground called Old Trafford. It was a large city, and dwellers in Harpurhey were somewhat frightened by its energy and sprawl. Queen’s Road and Rochdale Road, the joint Harpurhey western boundary, formed a sufficient world of amenity.

My mother left the stage and became a shopping housewife on these thoroughfares. Just before the War of 1914–18 began, she gave birth to my sister Muriel. I had a photograph of the two of them, long since eaten up by Malayan humidity and termites, and it showed a firm-featured smiling woman of considerable blonde beauty and a promise of similar beauty in the daughter. My father did not rush to leave them when war broke out: the Manchester Irish priests were not convinced of the righteousness of the war, and the liberation of Ireland from the Protestant English yoke took precedence. This was an imperialist war, and it was not right that British Catholics should slaughter Bavarian Catholics. The Wilson patriotism was, of course, a highly qualified commodity: the king they were urged to fight for was of a dynasty of Protestant usurpers: it had been passed down to my father that the last legitimate British king was James II. The Wilsons had supported Prince Charles Stuart when he had come recruiting in their city, and his song ‘Farewell, Manchester, sadly I depart’ could still bring tears to their eyes. My Uncle Jack, being a plumber, reluctantly at length joined the Royal Engineers, and my Uncle Jimmy had the bronchial complaint which is in the family: he kept to his genuflecting with lavatory basins on his shoulder. My father, being a cashier, joined the Royal Army Pay Corps, jocularly known as the Apple Pie Core, and spent his entire war career in barracks in Preston. It was honorable work that he performed: soldiers save the sum of things for pay.

I was born when the war was at its grimmest, on February 25, 1917. Unrestricted submarine warfare had begun at the beginning of the month, though food rationing was not to come in until my first birthday. England was still stunned by the death of a finger-pointing ikon: Lord Kitchener had been drowned on June 5, 1916, when the Hampshire struck a mine. The battle of the Somme, which had begun a month later, had whimpered to an end on November 13, with 420,000 British losses – a figure as hard to visualise as great wealth. But the Americans declared war on April 6, 1917, and on June 26 their first contingents arrived in France. I was not quite a month old when the Leningraders rehearsed the October Revolution. My birth thus coincided with that of the modern age – American world hegemony, the dissolution of Christendom. I yelled my Otto Rank anger at the light just as the Sunday pubs were opening. A child of the Fishes, I was thirsty as a fish: the lactal ducts could never refill fast enough.

February 25 is the feast day of saints and martyrs not much regarded – Victorinus and his companions, Caesarius of Nazianzus, the virgin Walburga, the bishops Tarasius and Gerland, Ethelbert of Kent. In 1601 it was an Ash Wednesday and the day of the execution of the Earl of Essex – one of those historical dates I can never forget. It is the birthday of musicians – Caruso, Myra Hess, of the impressionist painter Pierre Renoir, above all of the dramatist Carlo Goldoni, with whom I have always felt a faint affinity. The day before is the birthday of George Moore and of Arnold Dolmetsch, the day before that of George Frederick Handel. The day after honours Victor Hugo, Honoré Daumier, and Buffalo Bill. How much truth there is in astrology I do not know, but the first fortnight of Pisces certainly presides over arts to which I was attracted about equally in my youth. I spent too long deciding which art to follow – music, writing, drawing, the popular stage. It was not until I was thirty-seven that I became a writer. Certainly I had to be an artist of some kind or other. My father breathed beer on me and said: ‘He may be a new Napoleon.’ Not Wellington. The Catholic northwest, like Ireland, had looked to the French being on the sea, and the decay of the Orange.

One’s first memories are often vicarious: one is told that one did something or was involved in something; one dramatises it and folds the image falsely into the annals of the truly remembered. So, less than two years old, I am sitting on a shoulder in Manchester’s Piccadilly while a flag-waving crowd cheers the Armistice. Then the lights go out. In early 1919 my father, not yet demobilised, came on one of his regular, probably irregular, furloughs to Carisbrook Street to find both my mother and sister dead. The Spanish influenza pandemic had struck Harpurhey. There was no doubt of the existence of a God: only the supreme being could contrive so brilliant an afterpiece to four years of unprecedented suffering and devastation. I, apparently, was chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room. I should not have been chuckling; I should have been howling for food; perhaps the visiting neighbour who had herself just been stricken had provided me with a bottle of Glaxo. My father’s attitude to his son must now have become too complicated for articulation. It would have been neater if all three in that room had been obliterated. When I was old enough to appreciate his mingled resentment and factitious gratitude at my survival, I was able to understand his qualified affection, his lack of interest in any future I might have, the ill-considered second marriage which was a way of getting me off his hands.

Of my sister Muriel he passed on no memories. My mother survived briefly in vague reminiscences of the Manchester music hall – a voice that could ride over a restive audience, the shining abundant hair, the neat ankles. When she herself became part of an audience she was a comedian’s gift: her laugh was loud and primed general laughter. As a housewife she had no further duty to the lissom shape that had been her professional pride. She took to Guinness and boiled puddings. It would be easier to recreate her in fiction, relating her to Molly Bloom and Rosie Driffield, than to wrestle with a virtually non-existent reality. It is difficult to know how far we have an obligation to the dead. I sometimes resent my father’s failure to introduce me even to her insubstantial after-image, but he spoke little of her. She joined the great boneyard of the war and its aftermath. My father went back to Swift’s Beef Market, bought a straw hat, took heavily to draught Bass, and waited for the cleansing 1920s.

I come to full consciousness in a terraced house on Delauneys Road, Higher Crumpsall, in the care of my mother’s sister, Ann Bromley. She was a war widow with two daughters, Elsie and Betty. Opposite the house was a great infirmary where, I learned, people were cut open. This gratuitous slashing and slitting seemed reasonable to me, who must have absorbed by osmosis the ethos of the times. My father was a lodger, visible mainly on Friday evenings, when he brought home a prime joint from the beef market. For the rest of the time he drank or tried to cut down on his drinking by playing the piano in one of the local cinemas. He then combined both diversions by becoming the regular pianist at the Golden Eagle, a huge pub on Lodge Street, Miles Platting. There he met his second wife, who was the widowed landlady. In 1922 I was told that she was my new mother. Before then I called my aunt mother.

There is no magic in the word: it is the name a child will happily give to any woman who looks after him. It did not follow that Elsie and Betty were my sisters. I hear myself calling at the age of three and a half, with a Lancashire vowel: ‘Mother, mother – there’s a donkey on the road.’ A workman had knocked on the door asking for hot water for his tea can. He said: ‘You’re a big baby, shouting for your mother because you see a donkey.’ I did not know what he meant – fear of the donkey, wonder at it? How, anyway, did I know it was a donkey? Across the road, behind that gaunt façade of many windows, the cutting up of living bodies was calmly proceeding.