Under My Skin. Doris Lessing

the 1851 census as a Victualler. He was born in Somerset and his wife Eleanor was born in Limehouse. Their son, George James Flower, delinquent Emily’s father, was apprenticed to a John Flower, presumably a relative. The Flower family were barge owners, and on Emily’s birth certificate her father was described as lighterman.

      The Flower clan lived in and around Flower Terrace, now demolished, and George James and his wife Eliza Miller lived at Number 3 Flower Terrace. This was in Poplar, near what is now Canary Wharf. There were four children. Eliza was widowed, aged thirty-five, and the closeness and mutual helpfulness of the clan is shown by how, although women did not do this then, the lightermen and watermen allowed her to be a barge owner and take apprentices. She made her son Edward an apprentice and he later became lighterman and barge owner in her place. Her children did well, and she ended in a pleasant house, with an annuity. Emily was the youngest child and she married John William McVeagh in 1883.

      My mother described the house she was brought up in as tall, narrow, cold, dark, depressing, and her father as a disciplinarian, strict, frightening, always ready with moral exhortations.

      The well-off working class had a good life in late Victorian times, with jaunts to the races, all kinds of parties and celebrations. They most heartily ate and drank. Nothing dreary or cold about Flower Terrace and its companion streets, full of relatives and friends. Emily came from this warm clan life into the doubtless ardent arms of John William McVeagh – he must have been very much in love to marry her – but she was expected to match herself to his ambitions, to the frightful snobberies of a man fighting to leave the working class behind. I imagine her running back home when she could to her common family, for dances, good times and going to the races. She must have lived in her husband’s house under a cold drizzle of disapproval, from which, or so I see it, she died, aged thirty-two.

      My mother never mentioned her grandfather, John William’s father, and that meant John William did not talk about him any more than he did about Emily.

      ‘The information for this family,’ says the researcher, ‘comes from births, deaths and marriages, the clerical directory, the Public Record Office, army records and books on the Charge of the Light Brigade, census reports, wills and local directories. John McVeagh’s date of birth and place of birth conflict in the records. Army records of birth and occupation are frequently incorrect as men enlisting, for reasons of their own, gave wrong information, and it would have been difficult to check up in the pre-1837 registration time. In any case, recruiting stations were not particular in the army of the nineteenth century.’

      John McVeagh was born in Portugal, and his father was a soldier. He was in the 4th Light Dragoons, and was a Hospital Sergeant Major when he left the army in 1861. He was in the Crimea and East Turkey and in the Charge of the Light Brigade – he really was, for soldiers made that claim who had no right to it. But why did they want to have been part of such carnage? John McVeagh’s conduct as a soldier was exemplary. When his horse was shot under him in the Charge he continued to tend the wounded though wounded himself. He received various medals. Here is an entry for March 1st 1862, the United Service Gazette:

      4th (Queen’s) Hussars – Cahir. On Friday the 21st ult. Serjt-Major J. McVeagh late of this regiment, now Yeoman Warder of the Tower, was presented by the officers of his late corps with a purse containing 20 guineas, a silver snuff box beautifully engraved, showing his former services. Few men have been more honoured for their good conduct than Serjt-Major McVeagh on leaving his regiment, then at the Curragh, a few months back, to take his new appointment after 24 years service. The non-commissioned officers and privates presented him with a splendid tea service with the following inscription: ‘To Hospital Serjt-Major John McVeagh, as a token of respect for his general kindness.’ During the Crimean War he was at all times with his regiment in the field, attending both sick and wounded, and for such distinguished conduct received a medal, with an annuity of £20, besides a Turkish and a Crimean one with 4 clasps.

      His wife was Martha Snewin, and her father was a bootmaker. She was born in Kent. She travelled all around the country with her husband when he was an army recruiter. That is all we know about her. He saw to it the children had a good education. Their daughter Martha, who looked after him when his wife died, was left well provided-for, but she is one of the invisible women of history.

      My grandfather John William was the youngest son. First he was a clerk in the Meteorological Office, and by 1881 he was a bank clerk. Then he became a bank manager, in the Barking Road, but he died in Blackheath. He bettered himself, house by house, as he moved, and this son of a common soldier married his second wife, Emily’s successor, in St George’s, Hanover Square. This stepmother was not, as I imagined – because of her elegant beaked face – Jewish, but was the daughter of a dissenting cleric, who later became a priest in the Anglican church. She came from a middle-class family. Her name was Maria Martyn. My mother described her, with dislike, as a typical stepmother, cold, dutiful and correct, unable to be loving or even affectionate with the three children. They preferred life downstairs with the servants for as long as it was allowed, but my mother and her brother John became snobbishly, not to say obsessively middle-class, while the third child, Muriel, married back into the working class. Although my mother kept tenuous contact with her, the father would have nothing to do with her. It was her mother coming out in her, the servants said.

      So he was disappointed in both his daughters. When my mother decided to be a nurse, instead of going to university – John William was ambitious for her – she was similarly cut off from his approval. Until, that is, she did well, but it was too late, the bonds had snapped. Never, ever, did my mother speak of her father with affection. Respect, yes, and gratitude that he did well by her, for he made sure they were given everything proper for middle-class children. She went to a good school, and was taught music, where she did so well the examiners told her she could have a career as a concert pianist.

      The chapter heading for my mother in this saga would be a sad one, and the older I get, the more sorrowful her life seems. She did not love her parents. My father did not love his. It took me years to take in that fact, perhaps because it was always a joke when he said he left home the moment he could and went off as far as possible from them, as a bank clerk in Luton.

      My paternal great-grandfather, a James Tayler, appears in the 1851 census as a farmer with 130 acres, employing five men, at East Bergholt. He went in for melancholy and philosophical verse, which is perhaps why he was not successful. He married a Matilda Cornish. The Tayler family worked in various capacities in banks, were civil servants, minor literary figures, often farmers, all over Suffolk and Norfolk. During the migrations of the nineteenth century they went off to Australia and to Canada, where many live still. But my grandfather Alfred decided not to be a farmer. He was a bank clerk in Colchester. His wife was Caroline May Batley.

      This was the woman my father disliked so much – his mother.

      The picture he presented of his father, Alfred Tayler, was of a dreaming unambitious man who spent his spare time playing the organ in the village church, driving his ambitious wife mad with frustration. But by the time I heard this my father was also a dreaming unambitious man who drove his poor wife mad with frustration. And the fact was, my grandfather Alfred ended up as manager of the London County Westminster Bank, Huntingdon, but whether he went on playing the organ in the local church I do not know. When Caroline May died he at once married again, in the very same year, a woman much younger than he was, Marian Wolfe, thirty-seven to his seventy-four. She, too, was the daughter of a minister of religion.

      Ministers of religion and bank managers, there they are, in the records on both sides of the family.

      Caroline May Batley, my father’s mother, is almost as much of a shadow as poor Emily. The only pleasant thing my father remembered about her was that she cooked the delicious, if solid, food described by Mrs Beeton. The tale he told, and retold, and with relish shared by my mother, was how his mother came to the Royal Free Hospital to confront the newly engaged pair, both of them rather ill, to tell him that if he married that battleaxe Sister McVeagh he would always regret it. But I daresay Caroline May would have something to say for herself, if asked. It is probable she was related to Constable the painter. I like to think so.

      My mother’s childhood and girlhood were spent doing well