Short story (concluded): ‘My First Communist’

In the Easter holidays Peter went on a skiing trip to Switzerland organised by the headmaster. I could have gone myself, but my parents didn’t have the money. Privately, I was intrigued that the Freres could afford it either, but what bemused my friends was that ‘Frere’ was going at all, as he was notoriously unathletic, ungainly and accident-prone.

Sure enough, he was skiing down a slope on the second day, went over ‘a bump’, as someone put it, and broke both of his shins. It was the high point of the school trip. He got emergency care in Switzerland, then flew home on a stretcher with the rest of the group, the centre of attention. I was soon told by my mother that Peter was in bed at home recovering, and that I ought to go and see him.

Joy Frere opened the front door. I was bearing a bag of grapes and a bottle of Lucozade. I noticed immediately that the door to the front room was closed.

‘Go up,’ she said, ‘Peter will be pleased to see you. Helen is there.’ Helen? Helen? Who is Helen? I asked myself. ‘By the way, the tortoises are out now, if you would like to see them when you leave.’

I went up onto the dark landing and could see that the door to Peter’s bedroom was ajar. He was lying in bed with his head on the pillow, looking exhausted but smiling beatifically (there is no other word for it). With his right hand he was lightly caressing the hair and face of someone presumably bent towards him, and he was talking. I flattened myself against the wall and listened.

‘…a time completely different from now, Helen. The police, the army and the bureaucracy will have been abolished, probably there will be no money, just movements of numbers, not through banks, but electrically… Everyone will be made to have free education provided by the state, and there will be no marriage and family as we know them today. There will be free development of each for the development of all! And this council estate will give way to beautiful communal homes, high and perhaps made of glass, with fountains playing…’

I decided I’d heard enough, and didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping by Peter’s mother, so I went up to the door, knocked, waited for the patient to say ‘Yes?’, and entered.

The B.O. was powerful and I was flabbergasted by what I saw. It was Helen Minter, the most attractive girl on the estate, and probably a year older than Peter, sitting on the stool by the window, but right up against Peter’s bed. She had evidently straightened up as soon as I knocked, and was not in the least embarrassed.

‘Ah, Martin,’ said Peter without moving a muscle, as though on his death bed. ‘Do you know Helen?’

Well, of course I knew who she was, but I had never dared speak to her. She had a rather long, sculpted face, pale skin, shoulder-length fair hair and smoky-blue eyes, and if you passed her in the street she would always beam a smile at you that made you go weak in the bladder. She performed this now, said ‘Hello…’ to me softly, and vacated the stool.

‘I must go, Peter,’ she announced.

‘I suppose you must, Helen…’ Peter drawled very quietly, smiling wanly and yearningly from his pillow. She emerged from the side of the bed and I took her place. She kept her eyes on Peter as she moved round the room, then lingered by the door, nodded, and left.

After presenting my wares and discussing Peter’s medical condition, I blurted out: ‘That was Helen Minter. Helen Minter! What on earth was she doing here?’

‘She’s a dear girl… You know, don’t you, that they live four doors away? They are terribly Christian. She heard that I was laid up, and decided she must visit the sick – that’s what she told my mother.’

I suddenly noticed that the Russian alphabet had been replaced by a colour portrait of Lenin with a spotted tie. The spots were strangely intimidating.

‘Does she come to see you very often?’

‘About every two days, and always on a Sunday afternoon.’

‘Does she stay long?’

‘Just over an hour. We talk about this and that, and she holds my hand. I must say, it’s rather nice when she lies next to me on the eiderdown and stares into my face… We have never kissed, you understand.’

He paused, pulled a smile at me, and froze it.

Almost in a state of shock, I cut my visit to a minimum. For politeness’ sake, I found Mrs Frere in the kitchen and cast my eyes over the tortoises. Despite the April sun, they weren’t exactly active. The biggest one was standing high on his front legs with his neck stretched out so far it looked as though he was hoping to fly forth from his shell. There was lettuce scattered about, but none of them was eating it.

When I was clear of the Freres’ house, I just stood on the pavement, did a rictal double take, and guffawed three times hollowly.

Helen Minter lay next to Peter Frere on his bed holding his hand and gazing into his face? How? Why? What could she see in him, the biggest gink in the school?! Greying hair, eyes and lashes like a woman’s, gawky limbs, a chisel chin… I was madly jealous. Was it remotely possible that she was doing this out of Christian charity? Doubtless that was the official reason, just as my own mother had told me I ‘ought’ to visit Peter that day. But there had to be more to it, if she was not resisting him stroking her face… How long would it last, I asked myself? Would she become his ‘girl friend’ when he recovered? Should I take to my bed myself?

I was adamant, of course, that I could not visit Peter again all the time Helen was calling. But I did not have to: within a fortnight, he was hobbling round the estate on crutches with Helen assisting him. From my bedroom window I saw them progressing slowly from ‘the top’ in full sight of all the houses in the avenue. She was wearing a blue shirt and some kind of apron dress over the top of it. I honestly thought for a moment that she had dressed up to be nurse to Peter’s wounded war hero and they expected a round of applause. Ten days later, I was walking ‘up the top’ myself, to see my grandmother, when they suddenly appeared round the corner coming towards me on the other side of the road. Peter had thrown away one of his crutches, Helen was dressed normally, tastefully, as befitted a girl attending an exclusive school, and she was clinging to his free arm. I swear Peter slowed down and walked more ‘painfully’ when he saw me. As they drew level, they both smiled sweetly but said nothing. I nodded and half waved, as though in a hurry…

How it all turned out, I never discovered. I never visited the Freres’ house again, I was aware that Peter would be concentrating on his ‘O’ Levels that summer, or should be, and I finally lost touch. I can’t continue the chronology, so to speak. It’s almost sixty years ago now and I only remember isolated events and gossip.

Peter got five ‘O’ Levels, but they were good enough for him to go into the Science Lower Sixth. In the autumn term I saw him once or twice at school looking really quite normal (his height blended better with his being a sixth-former), and even wearing a boater. Then the hilarious, but essentially rather serious news went round the school that he had been arrested for obstruction whilst distributing leaflets at a demonstration by miners from the local collieries. I think what struck us, in the Fifth Form, was that at seventeen Peter Frere was behaving as though he was an adult. This left one with a rather uncomfortable feeling, akin to the apprehension that Helen Minter had lain on his bed in that foetid bedroom.

The last time I ever saw him must have been the following summer. I bumped into him on the street wearing normal clothes and looking nearly thirty. We stopped and stood quite apart. He did not cock his head on one side as he talked to me, and seemed even more self-contained than usual.

‘How are you doing at that school?’ he asked.

‘Oh, you know… Grinding for ‘O’ Levels. How’s yourself?’

I suddenly realised he must have left and I had not noticed.

‘I suppose you heard, I had to leave. I’ve got a job at a small engineering firm, Walter Hendersons, between here and Blurbury. It’s very good. I go every day by bus.’

In retrospect, it looks as though things went rapidly downhill from then on. Peter’s father died later that year. My parents took the local paper, but I never read it. However, a photo of Mr ‘Reg’ Frere in his black jacket, waistcoat and tie caught my attention in the paper on the back of an armchair. I read that he had joined the Communist Party in 1920, was a high-up in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and had worked closely with the NUM in the coalfield. One day I was passing the Freres’ house on the corner and noticed it was empty. Mrs Frere, my mother told me, had moved to Blurbury to live with Peter, who was engaged to someone he had met at work. Then Mrs Frere died. Apparently she had always had blood pressure problems, which did not surprise me as she often presented ‘apple cheeks’. Peter did not present them, but I remember wondering whether at this rate he might be next, given his general sicklinesss and physique similar to his mother’s. But I later heard that he was married and living in London. At nineteen, so I was told, Helen Minter married an estate agent ‘with a sports car’ and moved to Brighton.

I survived the Lower and Upper Sixth and went on to University to read Zoology. This, of course, was common knowledge to all my parents’ friends. One of them, a woman who did am-dram with my mother, opened an artist’s and stationery shop in the old part of the town and I went to it one summer when I was home, to buy some tubes of water colour. It was a long, wood-lined, rather dark room, but the far end was all glass facing a radiant garden. The proprietress, Eileen, was very affable, and after I had paid she said to me, ‘Would you like to see our tortoises?’ Obviously, I was mildly surprised – and assented.

The light glowed more and more golden in the garden as we approached the glass door into it. I saw at once that it was a sun trap. It was completely enclosed and mature trees bowed inwards from its feather-edge fence, with a rich border of flowers in front of them, a rockery to one side, even a small fountain playing at the back. And there, on a not over-mown lawn, were the tortoises…the Freres’ tortoises! I observed and counted them, and there could be no doubt about it. The big two looked as old as ever, the yellow one as small. None of them had changed, and yet they were noticeably more active than they had been at Peter’s. The biggest was striding around the garden occasionally stopping and looking up at the sun. The second biggest was tearing a beef tomato apart with its front claws. The medium-sized three were circulating from one form of food to another – lettuce, strawberries, even a small heap of pink rose petals was provided. In a recess between two large lavender bushes in the border there was a wooden house for them all. We had entered leaving the glass door open, but none of them made any attempt to escape. As I watched, the yellow tortoise set off for the fountain, climbed into the shallow dish beneath it, and sat there drinking and sunbathing. It was Utopia.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.