Memoirs of a Private Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

slowly back to life and, to the doctor’s astonishment and delight, began to move his right arm and leg again. Presently he was able to go out in a wheelchair, then to walk with a stick – a few steps, and ever a few steps further. But physically he was a ruined man, and such had been the damage to his brain that he began to have fits – sometimes twice a month, sometimes at longer intervals. In them he would go purple and grey, and as the fit reached its climax he would scream at the top of his voice. No sedative was able to cure or prevent them. Sometimes a handkerchief tied and tightened around the right arm would check them and the attack would pass off with only a brief aguelike shaking.
    It was at this early stage of his convalescence that we bought a wheelchair, which he could steer by means of a long iron handle at the front, and during the first summer holidays I used to push him as far as Birch Park where, on a quiet afternoon, he would get out and sit on a park seat, sometimes chatting – so far as he was able – with a friend. During these peaceful interludes I raised his ire more than once by standing on the chair, steering with the bar and pushing with the other leg. This way one could get up a fine turn of speed and go careering round the park paths with the wheelchair going backwards.
    It was the following summer that I went with my parents for a prolonged stay at Morecambe. My father by then could walk short distances with a stick; we stayed at a small hotel at the end of Regent Road and walked every morning to the front, on to the pier and along to its end where every day a concert party called ‘Jack Audley’s Varieties’ performed. No doubt a more adventurous boy would have struck out on his own, but, apart from absenting myself when there was a rough sea to watch – and sometimes the sea can be spectacularly rough there – I went along and listened and, of course, read. Because the concert party was not geared to people staying more than two weeks the programmes repeated fairly frequently, so that in the end I could, without conscious effort, remember and sing, with all the words, their entire repertoire. Even today I can remember twenty songs, and when my children were young I would sometimes entertain them with these. Reference was then sometimes made to ‘Daddy’s music-hall days’. Alas, all my music-hall days were spent reclining in a deckchair.
    Of course after his illness my father was quite incapable of any form of work, and within four months my Uncle Tom called to say regretfully that the firm could no longer afford to pay his salary. I listened, convinced that destitution stared us in the face, not knowing that my father for years had taken a derisory salary in order to bolster the profits of the firm, of which my mother, being a partner with her two brothers, took a third share.
    Tom’s eldest son, the younger Tom, whom I much liked, presently joined the firm. Young Tom was a very strange character (an extreme example of the kind of eccentric the Mawdsley family occasionally throws up): an intellectual, a lover of music and the arts, a dilettante, and a neurotic. Like his three brothers he was brought up under the iron hand of his irritable, ill-tempered, jolly, uncultured, weathercock of a father, and when the boys were at home they did everything they were told, exactly as they were told, and no questions asked. (My mother said they crept around the house like white mice.) May, their mother, was an easygoing, eventempered but astute woman who alone knew how to manage Tom senior. The boys, when they possibly could, kept out of his way.
    But young Tom, although he did not marry and continued to live at home, developed a life of his own, joined the Manchester Athenaeum, went to concerts and read widely. In a way he was a sad young man – and there are many such about – a person with a passion for culture and no creative talent at