ABSTRACT
In 1962 I left school, Thurlwood House was sold, my parents were at last free to get married with the death of my father’s second wife, and we moved home for the tenth time in my 17 years. The next year my parents got married, we moved home for the eleventh time and President Kennedy was assassinated. In my last term at Beaumont I started dimly to realise the sacrifice my parents had made to send me there, and how poorly I had repaid them. Beaumont had kept me resolutely in the bottom stream, and I had made no effort to acquire sporting distinction, for I never mastered the trick of enjoying sports when they were compulsory. I had even managed to avoid any promotion at all in the CCF – most of my contemporaries were NCOs, but I was not, perhaps because I had never hidden from Major Roddy my contempt for the whole business. But it now occurred to me that I should try at least to do something that would make my father proud, and make him feel it had all been worthwhile. The chance came when a small debating team was to be sent to speak at Eton. I had made a bit of a splash in the debating society, and was delighted when the Jesuit who ran it agreed that I could be in the team. But a deputation went up to the Jesuit charged with discipline
asking that I be removed from the team, and he agreed to remove me. I never knew why. “It’s because you smell, Beckett”, a boy in the year above told me, but I don’t think I did. At the time I thought perhaps they remembered the grammar school, or had found out how poor we were. The truth, I think, was that Beaumont was pathetically grateful to be invited to Eton, and feared I might say something out of place. The sale of Thurlwood paid the debts and bought a small but new car, a Triumph Herald. We moved to a pleasant flat, the ground floor of a big house in Wimbledon. This flat seems to have been found for us by the West German embassy, and I think may even have been rented from them; and it was vacant because one of their top officials was going home. I don’t know what story lies here, but John had been writing for help with growing desperation to every old contact who he thought might still feel kindly towards him. Did my father, 17 years after the war, still have friends, or friends of friends, at the West German embassy? He still worked nights for Securicor, but took care not to be seen in the uniform. He feared meeting old friends, or, even worse, old Beaumont boys whom I might know. He left the flat in the Triumph Herald wearing a sports jacket over his uniform trousers, and put on the cap and jacket when he got to work. Kyrle’s 1962 death certificate for the first time told the truth about her age – she was 75 – and described her as “wife of John Beckett, journalist (retired)”. But it left one final mystery. Notification of the death was given by someone called E.A. Beckett-Bourchier, described as Kyrle’s daughter. Another half-sister I know nothing of? Almost certainly not, I’d say; no one in my father’s family seemed to think you should tell the truth on these forms if you can possibly help it. A sister, describing herself as a daughter to avoid probate issues? Who knows? Kyrle Bellew’s death enabled my parents to get married at the register office in neighbouring Morden. I don’t think they wanted to particularly. They were sleeping in separate rooms – the Wimbledon flat was just big enough to allow this, though it meant that John’s small bedroom had to double as his office, where he still wrote Advice and Information and answered letters from those clients still left to him. Anne was now exasperated with John all the time. The noise his false teeth made chewing on his meat shredded her nerves, especially
since he always talked loudly with his mouth full; and she no longer bothered to hide her feelings. Somewhere inside her, she knew what his foolishness had done to her. She was desperately alone. She had never been comfortable with his Catholic friends from Rickmansworth, and anyway we never saw them. John and Anne ere not on speaking terms with any of their fascist friends. She did, I think, have someone to talk to, but only in absolute secrecy. Sylvia Morris, William Joyce’s old friend, Anne’s comrade in arms in her campaign to get her husband released, had decisively broken with the anti-Semitic right and become fervently anti-racist. She had joined the Labour Party, and in the 1950s she was organising trade union holidays in Eastern Europe, until in 1962 she became secretary of the British Yugoslav Society. She was also having an intense affair with a Jewish actor who had three children, and he was in the throes of a difficult separation from his wife. Anne and Sylvia met for lunch from time to time, but it was awkward. Sylvia could not tell either her lover or her colleagues whom she was meeting; there had to be a cover story every time. She could never come to our home, or have Anne to hers. Anne and Sylvia took their troubles to each other over lunch in department stores. I am not sure how much Anne could burden the younger woman with her troubles, though. Sylvia had her own troubles. Her actor turned out to be bipolar, married and occasionally violent. Just as Sylvia was ready to act on Anne’s good advice and get out of this relationship quickly, the actor’s wife killed herself, leaving him with three children whom he was clearly not capable of looking after. Sylvia had grown close to the children, who faced a life in care. She stayed with them and their father, and brought them up. In Sylvia’s lifetime, the three children she brought up never knew that she had been a fascist; and, of course, they never met Anne. But they are devoted to the memory of Sylvia.
