My Son, My Son Read online

  MY SON, MY SON

  Howard Spring

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

  www.apollo-classics.com

  About My Son, My Son

  This is the powerful story of two hard-driven men – one a celebrated English novelist, the other a successful Irish entrepreneur – and of their sons, in whom are invested their fathers’ hopes and ambitions. Oliver Essex and Rory O’Riorden grow up as friends, but in the years after the Great War their fathers’ lofty plans have unexpected consequences as the violence of the Irish Revolution sweeps them all into uncharted territory.

  For Eric Hiscock

  A few men and women who have played some part in the history of our times are mentioned in this novel. These apart, all characters are fictitious and all scenes are imaginary.

  And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About My Son, My Son

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part III

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part IV

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part V

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  About Howard Spring

  Endpapers

  About the cover and endpapers

  More from Apollo

  About Apollo

  Copyright

  Introduction

  William Essex rises from humble beginnings to become a successful dramatist and novelist. We get to know him rather well: he is the narrator of this novel. His friend Dermot O’Riorden, a reluctant Irish patriot, a talented joiner, founds a leading London furnishing emporium. When they first meet, both poor and aspiring, O’Riorden is ‘sitting at a very dusty desk set in the middle of a small dusty room that was not so much lighted as dimmed by one small dusty window’. They become close friends, pouring out their hearts to one another. O’Riorden calls Ireland ‘a stinking, starving little country that I’m glad to be out of’; but he also says, ‘If ever I have a son […] I’ll dedicate him to Ireland’.

  My Son, My Son – William’s and Dermot’s story – belongs equally to their sons, Oliver Essex and Rory O’Riorden. The boys grow up as friends in their father’s shadows but, emerging into their own light, the very history that their parents have managed to circumvent lays hold of them. Fathers whose best-laid plans were for their sons, have no power to deliver them from their plans’ consequences. Oliver and Rory are their Absaloms. Fathers provide, counsel, watch, regret, but cannot prevent. Of the mature women characters, only Livia Vaynol, a free and freeing spirit who arrives too late, gives the novel a romantic focus.

  When it first appeared in 1938 the novel was entitled O Absalom! Two years before its publication, William Faulkner’s masterpiece Absalom, Absalom! was published. My Son, My Son! kept only the repetition and, initially at least, the exclamation mark. Spring’s and Faulkner’s fathers could hardly be more unalike. If the books share themes – civil conflict, family, material, cultural and political ambition – they are worlds apart in form, texture and tone. Faulkner is a self-inventing modernist; Spring a social novelist in the English line of Eliot, Meredith and Hardy.

  1937 had been a good year for English fiction. On publication, Spring’s book succeeded John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men on the bestseller list and outsold Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca in its first year. Both these books have retained the limelight better than My Son, My Son and have not been out of print, where My Son, My Son’s hour has come and gone and come again as its themes return to topicality. In 1940 it was made into a feature film in the United States – where the book was extremely popular – directed by Charles Vidor and foregrounding the romantic themes. In 1979 it became an eight-episode BBC television series exploring the Irish dimension. Kate Binchy played Sheila O’Riorden, Frank Grimes Dermot and Gerard Murphy was Rory; Michael Williams was William and Patrick Ryecart Oliver. The two treatments are totally different, yet the book contains them both.

  Howard Spring is a city novelist. Born and reared in poverty in Cardiff, his poverty is not rural but urban, of the slums. His is not Gaskell, Galt or Hardy territory. He has more in common with the worlds of Arnold Bennett and J.B. Priestley, writers whom he succeeded as an influential book reviewer at the Evening Standard.

  The early chapters of My Son, My Son are set in and around my home town, Manchester. His first novel, Shabby Tiger (1934) is also set there. The locations – Deansgate, St Anne’s Square, Palatine Road, even the Old Cock Inn – still recognizably survive. ‘All the way from Ancoats to Hulme there was not a tree, not a shrub, not a twig to be seen.’ Things have improved a little, but his world is familiar in outline. The action takes place a century ago, but the map of Manchester and its suburbs has not much changed. Many old buildings still stand, now put to different uses, or derelict and awaiting rehabilitation or the wrecker’s ball. Hulme, where the protagonist endures his threadbare childhood and his mother works as a laundress, is improved but recognizable. The winter streets can still be ‘full of writhing yellow fog’. Grey laundry hangs on lines, bullies are busy bullying, straitened families sprawl and multiply; ‘there was a funeral now and then to thin us out’. Some once-posh neighbourhoods have come down in the world, but Didsbury today is still Spring’s Didsbury, a place to aspire to.

  Nellie Moscrop, whom William decides early on in his climb out of poverty to marry ‘in cold blood’, having realized how sick and how rich her father is, draws William’s attention to the Manchester novels and writers. Jane Eyre ‘began to get written not ten minutes’ walk from here’, and Mrs Linnaeus Banks’s The Manchester Man was also local produce. William heeds her, but even then realises that the he is in transit through these streets that are like ‘a small frozen furrow in the waste of the city’, and that the people he uses to rise by he will eventually leave behind – apart from his intimate friend Dermot who rises in a different way and place. The narrator’s candour is reliable and unnerving: he is without moral scruple, which makes time’s judgement on him seem less gratuitous, more just.

  William is attuned to social division. Having begun in poverty, he works and calculates his way out of it. His first job, in the novel’s first sentence, is fetching washing for his washerwoman mother. He notices the differences between her clients; some considerate, others brusque. A knowledge of social division pervades the novel, a division based less on social class than on material possession. And William becomes increasingly aware of political division, between Britain and Ireland. Spring is a spare writer, his descriptive writing conveying a kind of uninsistent symbolism. The story moves forwar
d in the characters’ time and the country’s history. The little details are telling: whether a jam roll, Flynn’s narrative of the Manchester Martyrs, or William’s mother’s funeral procession. Spring’s London is less real than his Manchester, and when he writes Cornwall he has travelled a little too deep into Du Maurier country, leaving the real map behind.

  Actual incidents and public figures tie the fictional elements to history. Spring insists on the reality of his novel. If someone leaves the action he will tell us – don’t imagine they’ll be back again. They leave for good, the way people do, the way things happen. He insists there is no design: this is life, plain and simple. The Irish home rule versus independence argument is conducted with increasing emphasis – Dermot’s ‘God damn England’ becomes Sheila’s ‘God bless Ireland’ – until we are in the heat of it. As if it was the book’s specific prophesy, in 1996 its themes came to fruition in the huge IRA bomb that stunned Manchester city centre.

  One aspect of Spring’s realism was his commercial calculation. He dedicated the book to Eric Hiscock, author of the influential ‘Whitefriar’ column for Smith’s Trade News, the source of information for the book world. Hiscock had a nose for bestsellers. His endorsement could make a book’s fortune. Commercial calculation may have been on Spring’s mind. It is always on William’s mind as he climbs the social ladder and acquires the trappings of affluence. In a way, William is the prototype for the modern writer: a servant to his readers and his interests, knowing which side his bread is buttered on, and lacking the devil-may-care integrity that marks Hardy’s and Eliot’s protagonists. This corruption of artistic ambition is what the novel is about. It is an excellent novel because it makes no scruple in laying bare its narrator’s existential compromise and the consequences it has.

  Michael Schmidt, 2016

  Part I

  1

  I liked fetching the washing from the Moscrops’, and my mother liked washing for Mrs. Moscrop better than for anybody else. That was because Mrs. Moscrop always wrapped a bar of yellow soap in with the washing. There wasn’t anyone else who thought of a thing like that.

  The Moscrops’ shop stood on a corner. The frontage was on the main road. To reach the bakehouse at the back you went down the side-street. The shop window looked very gay that night, especially as the streets were full of writhing yellow fog. It was a few days of Christmas. Chinese lanterns, some in long concertina shapes, some spherical, all lit with candles, reinforced the two gas jets which normally lighted the window. There was a long brass tube running the length of the window with half a dozen gas points sprouting from it like nipples, but only one at either end was ever lit. I suppose the Moscrops, like the rest of us in Hulme, had to think of pennies.

  But that idea didn’t occur to me then. Moscrops’ was an oasis of light in the dingy slum, a lounging-place and rendezvous of the boys and girls, and on that particular night, with holly stuck into the tops of cakes, with coloured paper chains dangling in loops from one Chinese lantern to another, with “A Merry Christmas” hanging in separate silver letters from a string that was itself sparkling as though with hoar frost, Moscrops’ looked as enchanting a window as a child could wish. There were loaves covered with crisp brown crust, buns oozing currants, Christmas puddings, cloth-covered, in basins, tall jars of biscuits, and bottles of sweets.

  When I pushed open the door, a bell above it gave one unresonant sound, more of a click than a ring, and there I was with the raw night shut out, the familiar, warm, foody smell all about me. Mrs. Moscrop, squat and rounded and friendly as one of her own cottage loaves, came in from the parlour behind the shop. “Oh, the washing!” she said. “It’s not quite ready. Just go and talk to Mr. Moscrop in the bakehouse.”

  I went down the side-street and pushed open the bakehouse door. A lovely place! Lovelier even than the shop, warmer, more filled with appetising smells. Two deal tables ran down the length of it. They were as smooth as silk. Old Moscrop, shuffling about in slippers, with no coat or waistcoat, with his shirt-sleeves rolled high up and with a long white apron tied about his middle, looked as though he had been born in the place. His face was as creamy and pudgy as dough. All the rest of him was covered by a fine white film of flour. The door of the great oven was open, and I could see into its cavernous depths. Row upon row of loaves was within, some in tins, some standing in the brown armour of their crust. Mr. Moscrop had a wooden spade with an enormously long handle. With this he could reach right to the back of the oven. Sliding the blade under the loaves, he began to draw them out and put them on the two long deal tables. Some were for Mr. Moscrop’s shop and delivery round. Others had been baked for customers who made up their own dough at home. Fanciful people pricked their initials into the top of the dough. Others wrote their names on pieces of paper and skewered them on to the loaves with matchsticks. These pieces of paper were now brown and brittle and would fall to bits if you touched them.

  Mr. Moscrop cast an eye at me now and then, but he did not speak till all the loaves were on the tables. Then he pulled towards him a long jam roll, took up a knife, struck off an inch or two and pushed it towards me. In a voice as hoarse as though his throat were choked with flour, he said: “’Ave a pennorth.”

  The ritual was unfailing. The washing was never ready. I was always sent to the bakehouse. Mr. Moscrop always invited me to have a pennorth. Then I went back to the shop.

  But now my heart gave a thump. Two boys were standing outside the window. I knew they would still be there when I came out. They were. I was burdened with that monstrous bundle, the week’s washing of the Moscrop family assembled inside a sheet, with the four corners of the sheet tied together. I gripped the knot thus made with both hands. Only so could I carry the load, bending forward to allow it to rest on my bowed back. I was twelve years old, very thin and weak, and very much afraid of the two boys who, I knew, were following me. Presently they passed me at a light run, one in front of the other. Each gave a shoulder-shove as he went by, making me stagger. They vanished in the fog ahead. They would be waiting at the next corner, so, making the fog an ally, I doubled back and struck off down a side-street. I could get home by a detour. Presently, I heard them questing noisily, yelling the call with which they always assailed me: “Does your mother take in washing?” It went to a sort of tune, with a heavy stress on the first syllable of the last word, the “ing” trailing away and rising. I used to hear that call in my sleep. It haunted me everywhere.

  Now they were on my trail. They had tumbled to my poor ruse. I turned swiftly to the right, down a dark lane between two sets of back doors. It was a fool’s move, for it was a dead-end. I could hear them whooping through the fog and prayed that they would rush by. But they didn’t. They felt their way cautiously down the entry and found me trembling, with my hands still clutching the big knot in the sheet, the bundle still on my back. I don’t know why they persecuted me. Simply because they were young and foolish and I was helpless, I suppose. They tore open the bundle, scattered its contents in the muddy lane, leapt among them like mad things, chanting their song, and ended by pushing me down into the sorry mess, snatching my cap from my head, and making off with wild hoots of laughter.

  How I hated washing! It seemed to dominate life in our house in Shelley Street. It announced itself in the front window: Washing and Mangling done here. It made itself felt in the narrow passage-way which always smelt of steam and soap-suds. It overpowered the kitchen where, everlastingly, washed clothes hung from lines suspended under the ceiling, from clothes-horses grouped round the fire; and where the smell of ironing seemed the accompaniment of all life. But most of all it inhabited the scullery where the copper was, with a fire beneath, and where my mother wearily boiled, and rubbed on the rubbing-board, and rinsed and mangled.

  What a place it was, that dark little house that was two rooms up and two down, with just the scullery thrown in! I don’t remember to this day where we all slept, though there was a funeral now and then to thin us out.

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p; I was the youngest of the lot, the kid, the nuisance, too young to be of much use to the others either for work or play. They were glad to be rid of me; and, looking back to the conditions we lived in, I don’t blame them for that. All the same, I felt it at the time. I could imagine the sigh of relief when the front door banged behind me. It made me turn in on myself.

  One way of getting rid of me was often used in the summer. We had a small trade in herb beer, as a notice announced in our window alongside the one which advertised our activities in washing and mangling. I was often sent off to gather the herbs. A slab of bread and butter and a bottle of water were placed in a large basket, and, thus provisioned, I was expected to relieve the household of my presence for the best part of a day. I did so gladly.

  It pleased me very much to turn out of the black fortress of Hulme and strike southwards along the Palatine Road that was not then the roaring tramway track it has since become. With the sky blue overhead and the road white with dust underfoot, I tramped along enthralled by the evidences that passed me of a world of unimaginable wealth and splendour. From their great houses that lined the road all the way between Fallowfield, Withington and Didsbury the kings of cotton came on their way to Manchester. Victorias and phaetons and barouches, coachmen with gloved hands and cockaded hats, footmen, gentlemen on horseback: all passed by along the road that was gay with hawthorn and cherry trees, laburnum, lilac and chestnut. Now and then, leaning back upon her cushions with a parasol above her head, some lady would be bound for the shops of St. Ann Square or Market Street, a lady so daunting with her great hat and flounced cape and lowered insolent eyes that it was impossible to conceive the circumstances in which her life was passed.

  And there were the houses themselves to gaze upon and wonder at: big, square, stucco-fronted houses for the most part, each one standing splendidly in its own grounds, with conservatories looking like ornamental copies of the Crystal Palace, and stables, coach-houses and outbuildings in which you might have lost, and been no wiser, the four rooms of our house in Shelley Street.