In a Land of Plenty Read online

  Mary Wyndham was eighteen years old and had, like Charles, grown up in the town, though their paths had only crossed for the first time a year before. Her father was a doctor in general practice with a mixture of private patients and ones on the National Health Service – whose introduction he had vehemently opposed; he had inherited his father’s surgery, and was a member of the middle class that felt its status diminishing in the postwar years, under a government one of whose Ministers said: ‘We know that the organized workers of the country are our friends. As for the rest, they don’t matter a tinker’s cuss.’

  Dr Wyndham was a gloomy physician who’d diagnosed his own condition as migraine, exacerbated by melancholia. Once or twice a month he retreated into glowering silence, and his wife draped beige cloths over the lamps and hushed her children if they laughed too loudly. His private patients grew old and he failed to impress new ones; he seemed weighed down by the stethoscope around his neck.

  Thomas Wyndham had been born in 1900. ‘This century’s in decline,’ he liked to say, ‘and so am I.’

  Mary’s mother was a gentle, timid woman who did her best to provide her family with palatable food from tasteless, meagre rations, to wash and clean with rationed soap, to improve the inferior clothes available; she spent hours in queues clutching a buff-coloured book of coupons and filled in endless forms for tickets for bread, petrol, coal.

  With two much older sisters, Mary was an almost-only child who grew up during the war and the age of austerity that followed. A remote and vacant girl, she neglected chores, failed to materialize at meals on time because she was lost in some corner reading, and addressed her family as if they were strangers. Once she disappeared for two days and the police found her dawdling in a street on the other side of town.

  ‘Why did you run away from us?’ her mother cried.

  Mary smiled brightly back at them. ‘I didn’t. I was just following the sun, and then the moon.’

  ‘Her head’s in the clouds,’ her father lamented. ‘She’s floating.’

  It didn’t help that she was the plainest of the girls, and therefore had no excuses. Her otherworldliness was that of a young heifer, with large brown eyes, who wandered around the house, grazing on whatever she found in the kitchen when she was hungry, or else stared at the sky with a vacant expression.

  And then Mary entered puberty. Her oldest sister Margaret, back from the war, had become a brawny, solid woman; Clare was homely and busy. Mary looked certain to follow them into unprepossessing womanhood. Instead she was transformed, over a period of months, into a slender, graceful willow of a woman with a delicate, oval face; the prettiest not just in her family but in her school and social circle. All she had in common with the child she had once been were her large brown eyes.

  What had once been Mary’s vices now became virtues: her laziness was revealed as delicacy, her poor time-keeping as originality, her nervous sporadic high spirits as charm, and her vacancy as evidence of a melancholy nature absorbed in matters of the spirit: she acquired the allure of beautiful youth.

  Boys queued up to court her, but she barely noticed them. She dreamed through her time at the girls’ high school, excelling only in English and Latin, and her father didn’t mind because the subjects he regarded as important for his daughters were poetry and domestic science, plus a working knowledge of the human body, useful preparation for a good marriage as well as an interim occupation as a nurse. It seemed to Mary that she spent her youth reading in a pool of yellow light in the joyless house, either to herself or – when he was able to withstand the noise of another person’s voice – nineteenth-century poetry out loud to her father. She couldn’t recall enjoying a single meal, putting on a dress that fitted her or hearing music in the family home; her memories of childhood were all dimly coloured, khaki or olive.

  Charles Freeman entered Dr Wyndham’s surgery one evening in the spring of 1951 for a check-up demanded by BUPA for his medical insurance policy. He explained that it was nonsense, of course, there was nothing wrong with him, he was fit as a fiddle, this was a ruddy annoying piece of red tape for a man as busy as himself. The morose doctor had to ask Charles to be quiet a moment so that he could time his pulse, test his reflexes, feel his glands, peer into his eyes and listen to his lungs. He told the young industrialist that he was right, he was in dauntingly good health; it was clear that his high blood pressure signified nothing more than the pounding heartbeat of his ambition.

  In the hall on the way out of the surgery, Charles saw Mary coming down the stairs. Dr Wyndham introduced his daughter, and Mary felt Charles’ dark eyes bore into her and heard his voice pour through her like honey. He shook her hand and she realized that if he didn’t let go of it soon she was going to faint.

  The following evening Charles reappeared in the surgery, complaining of a headache. Dr Wyndham searched in vain for further symptoms, and Charles brushed it off. Mary heard his voice in her room above, and happened to be passing through the hall when he left. Again they shook hands and exchanged pleasantries.

  The next day Charles returned suffering from indigestion, the day after that it was breathlessness, and by the end of the week he’d come up with a complaint which was genuine, that of insomnia, because by then he was lying awake at night thinking about the doctor’s daughter, with her oval face and wide brown eyes.

  ‘I don’t have a clue what’s wrong with you,’ Dr Wyndham admitted in exasperation. ‘You seem to have declined from vitality to hypochondria in the five days you’ve been my patient.’

  ‘With all due respect, doctor,’ Charles told him, ‘the cure is under your nose.’

  Charles’ parents had a small electrical engineering firm, along with an old foundry making metal castings, lamp posts and iron railings, and odd agricultural machinery. Their only son joined the company straight from school and had barely completed an apprenticeship – as his mother Beatrice called it – of the management of the firm by September 1939.

  The outbreak of war found the Freeman Company largely an assembly business using outside components for products designed for the electrical distribution market. The collapse in the volume of new work there brought a near standstill. The workmen joined the services, leaving behind a depleted, idle workforce of boys from school, old lags and a few women. Profits fell to their lowest for years and the search for work was handicapped by the lack of new equipment.

  With his parents dispirited, Charles effectively took over the firm at the age of twenty-two. The first thing he did was to threaten the chief engineer with the sack unless he was able, within a week, to make a simple belt-driven lathe that could turn out shells. With it Charles got his first contract from the Ministry of Supply and threw his energy and the company’s fortunes into war work.

  As the country was cut off from its import markets, the need to recycle metals into munitions became crucial. In July 1940 a campaign was begun to turn saucepans into Spitfires, calling upon the public to hand over everything from old keys to industrial safes. A mania for collecting swept through the town: libraries handed over old iron bookcases, children purloined their mothers’ kitchen utensils, Mary Wyndham’s primary school collected a ton of scrap metal, the council tore down street-lamps, iron staircases were dismantled leaving people marooned in the air, and patriots proved their virtue by removing railings from the tombs of their ancestors. By the autumn the town had generated a thousand tons of scrap iron.

  Much of the scrap was delivered – some of it was being returned – to the Freeman Company foundry, and after being melted down there was moved on to an increasing number of production lines manufacturing bombs, aircraft parts and mine sinkers for contracts from the Air Ministry and the Admiralty. As the war continued, so Charles ordered his engineers to adapt and diversify. The foundry roared and hammered day and night, and the factory site expanded with blackened glass-walled buildings filled with lines of lathes at which men and women made machine-gun mountings, rocket-firing apparatus, parts for Bren gun car
riers, tail units for Horsa gliders, depth charges, torpedoes, motor scythes and trenchers, and bulkheads for magnetic mines.

  ‘Flexibility was the key,’ Charles would later tell Mary. ‘We were small, but with the foundry we could make our own components. And by God’s good fortune the Luftwaffe never hit us.’

  By the end of the war the Freeman Company had been transformed from a dwindling family firm into a thriving manufacturer; and then the vast salvaging machine had to be thrown into reverse: Spitfires had to be turned back into saucepans. The limited housing programme in the town concentrated on expanding the estate around the factory site as returning soldiers took jobs there, and Charles instigated both an intensified programme of mechanization and the setting up of a single fine toolmaking department. There they made the jigs, fixtures, moulding, press and other tools upon which the rest of the factory depended, and trained the skilled apprentices upon whom the future would be built.

  ‘This is my town,’ Charles Freeman told his fiancée, on the roof of the house he’d just bought them, three weeks before their wedding.

  He had courted her on a number of dates, accompanied by chaperones, in between which boxes of luscious chocolates, sparkling jewellery and huge bouquets of flowers were delivered to brighten up the drab Wyndham home. Then at the end of the summer, Charles took Mary on their first date alone: he drove them down the A1 to London to the last day of the Festival of Britain, the celebration of the country’s recovery from war.

  At the South Bank Exhibition and Pleasure Gardens in Battersea Charles and Mary visited the television pavilion and the Home and Gardens exhibition, they drank coffee in a piazza beside the Thames and ate lunch in a brightly coloured restaurant, they marvelled at murals and modern sculptures, had rides on the Emett railway and the Mississippi Showboat.

  After darkness fell they laughed at Richard Murdoch and Kenneth Horne, danced on the Fairway to Geraldo and his orchestra, and joined Gracie Fields and a crowd of thousands singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and the National Anthem.

  Exhausted and in love, Mary leaned on Charles’ broad shoulder walking back to his Rover, where he produced a small box from the glove compartment. He snapped it open to reveal a diamond ring, with which he proposed, and before she fell asleep on the drive home – with Charles’ voice resonating around the car as he enumerated his plans for expansion – Mary felt a blissful reassurance that the man beside her was taking her out of her colourless childhood, and into a bright new future.

  It took a year of married life for Mary to conceive their first-born, though not for want of trying. She couldn’t be sure where it happened but she rather hoped it was in the third guest bedroom, because they made love there one dark Sunday afternoon and took their time. Her pregnancy was an easy one, and the only odd thing about it was that as she grew larger so too did her husband. He kept pace with her pound for pound, whether out of sympathy or competition it was hard to say. After their son, Simon’s, birth, Mary reattained her slender figure, but Charles continued to swell. He had an insatiable greed and the petulance of a child if he was hungry; freed from rationing, he demanded four square meals a day, and helped himself to snacks in between. By the time the last of their four children was born, he was a giant.

  Charles’ sexual appetite too was a regular, irresistible need: he marched into his and Mary’s bedroom in an altered state and approached her making animal noises. He clambered across their wide bed with a body gone soft, liquescent with desire: the fearsome charisma and willpower that made his great frame resemble that of a swarthy bull had left him, he was a skeleton surrounded by a sea of helpless flesh, his body gone soft around the part grown hard, and he poured himself over Mary’s unresisting body, sought her out, thrust with rolling waves and came with a grateful, groaning shudder that made her fear for the bones of her ribcage.

  Simon was born in 1954, and was followed at two-yearly intervals by James, Robert and Alice. Simon had dark, floppy hair, brown eyes, a sensual mouth and puppy fat that made him look like a miniature version of his father. He also had an older sibling’s smugness. One autumn morning at the age of five he woke after a chesty cold, recovered except for the fact that when he opened his mouth he spoke with a husky voice.

  ‘Sing us “Lili Marlene”!’ Charles told him.

  Simon liked his croaky voice so much that he decided to keep it, and he spoke slowly too, as if thinking each word as it came out; added to the already cute appeal of a tubby boy, Simon’s voice drew people towards him.

  Simon was a hypochondriac child. ‘My tummy bones hurt,’ he complained. ‘I’ve got hay fever in my knees, Mummy.’ He was brought low by a change in the weather, and got a nosebleed if he climbed the stairs too fast up to the children’s third floor. He got all the usual illnesses – chicken pox, mumps, measles – but, failing to acquire immunity like normal children, suffered again with each of his younger siblings when their turn came.

  Mary fretted over her first-born: she kept him home from school on the slightest pretext, took his temperature every hour and provided him with regular doses of medicinal chocolate milkshake. The only thing she forced him to do was to stay in bed reading the latest comics ordered by special delivery from Mr Singh’s Post Office Stores and Newsagent, or else sink into a nest of cushions and blankets downstairs on the sofa in front of the television; measures which provoked the envy of the other children and reconciled Simon to his delicacy.

  James too looked forward to being ill, since it was when their mother was most concerned with them: she wrestled the children’s welfare away from their nanny. Robbie considered Mary’s pampering bad for the bairns, convinced that looking after people when they were sick would only make them weaker. She recommended that illness be severely dealt with: a plain diet supplemented with cod-liver oil, enforced sleep, and solitary confinement in a cold room sealed from draughts and distractions.

  Mary floated into James’ room one morning when he had a flu-bug fever that Robbie announced was looking set to break the thermometer.

  ‘What’s the matter, little man? Are you all achey?’ Mary asked him. ‘Go and buy some starch or something, Nanny,’ she told Robbie. ‘I’ll look after James.’

  Robbie grimaced and muttered under her breath, ‘I’ll have a word with Charles about this,’ as she left the room.

  ‘Have as many words as you like,’ Mary called after her, and James swooned back on the pillows. James was a funny, intense child with sandy hair that the sun bleached blond and almost white; he had freckled, pale skin and sticking-out ears, so that in summer he resembled a scurrying, anxious albino bat, but one who would stop every now and then to watch what was going on around him through a pair of spectacles that were invariably held together with tape. He was born a wall-eyed child, looking in two different directions at once, until corrective spectacles gradually brought his divergent visions into alignment.

  Mary turned up the heating, opened the curtains, brought him Lucozade, a hot-water bottle and a draughtsboard and pieces, she stayed and played with him, which made him forget that he’d ever been in pain.

  ‘I don’t want to get better, Mummy,’ James told her. ‘I want to be ill all the time. Then you can stay here for the rest of my life.’

  ‘Oh, let me hug you,’ Mary soothed. The smell of her perfume made him feel better than Miss Syrup-of-Figs’ hideous medicines.

  The trouble was that the children rarely recovered quickly enough, and Mary began to lose interest. She had more important things to think about, even if it wasn’t clear what they were.

  ‘You’re so sweet, James,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later, little man.’

  ‘Where are you going?’ he croaked. ‘It’s your move, Mummy. You’re in a good position: you might win this game.’

  ‘I’ve got things to do, sweetie-pie. I’ll tell Robbie to come and look at you.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ he pleaded, in vain.

  Robbie reappeared with her self-satisfied straight back, and James saw h
er rub her hands with glee before she unplugged the wireless, removed his teddy bear (‘a perfect place to harbour germs’) and searched his body for a plaster she could rip off with relish.

  Simon was the one most often ill, and no one could understand why he was closer to his father than his mother, because Charles had no patience with Simon’s fragile constitution. He believed that illness was simply another word for malingering; he imagined that employees phoning in sick were making fun of him, they were probably digging the garden or off to the seaside, laughing to themselves at ‘getting something for nothing’, as he put it, which he imagined to be the main aim in life of most members of the working class.

  ‘Don’t you dare bully Simon. He’s a sensitive boy,’ Mary told him. ‘You must remember having measles yourself, for goodness’ sake.’

  ‘Me?’ he replied. ‘I was never ill, woman, I’ve told you that. I didn’t miss a day’s school throughout my education. For all the good it did me.’

  Simon appealed to his grandmother Beatrice for help in the matter, shortly before she died, since it was quite clear that his father’s memory was defective. But Beatrice had never taken any notice of her offspring’s ailments.

  ‘How do you think I could have run the business if I was constantly blowing his nose and wiping his bottom?’ she demanded of her grandson.

  James could just remember his grandmother, Beatrice; he was four when she died, and he remembered her as a tiny old woman who seemed to have shrunk in her old age to the same size as his older brother, Simon. He remembered her as a decrepit dwarf crawling like a snail through the house, cursing the children who swept past her like the wind and forced her to clutch hold of furniture to save herself from being knocked over. He remembered how she moved so slowly that no one ever knew where she was, and they had to search through the house for her at mealtimes: she left a trail behind her, a scent of ammonia and face-powder which they were able to follow, and they knew they were getting close when they heard her frail, bitter curses. The children found her, and led her through to the dining-room.