edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and a faded black platoon of
Crockford’s Clerical Directories
. The Ancestors had left us the krisses, kukris, dress swords and elephant bells which hung as ornaments on our walls. We had General Sir Edward’s medals nestling in rosy velvet in their glass case, the colored coat of arms which had been granted to some Ancestor or other for a bold piece of commercial sharp practice in the early nineteenth century, along with the Ancestors’ carriage clocks, games tables, antimacassars, aspidistra bowls, barometers, walking sticks, pincushions, samplers, crested silver and old shoes. The Ancestors themselves were there too—in miniature, on ovals of ivory, in cutout silhouette, in great slablike oil portraits framed with tousled gilt. Cousin Emma sat at her writing desk. The Recorder of Bombay wore his wig. The Suffragan Bishop of some other Asian outpost looked like an overdressed doll in his clerical furbelows and frills. Colonel William … George Caspar … Tom Priaulx … The Ancestors both outnumbered and outclassed us.So much cleverer, more adventurous and richer than we were ourselves, the Ancestors were our island heritage, our history, our men of yore, and we crept bashfully about in their long shadows.
We ate our chopped meat and instant mashed potatoes off their plates with their silver cutlery; but most of their furniture was put out of bounds as too good to be spoiled by grubby contemporary fingers—fingers which had been blackened in the process of dutifully polishing the Ancestors’ rubbishy pieces of Benares brass. They were impossibly tough taskmasters, these Victorian half-pay officers and frowning clergymen and lawyers. My young father sat up late into the night working in their service, his inherited dog collar clipped over the top of his inherited shirt with its turned and darned cuffs.
“Shush, dear—can’t you see that Daddy’s busy writing the Family Tree?”
He lived—exactly as I do now—in a mess of papers. He wrote on file cards, on the backs of letters, in school exercise books, in ancestral ledgers. He had appointed himself official secretary to the Ancestors, and there was no Ancestor too obscure, no third cousin too far removed—my father took dictation from anyone in whose veins had flowed a single corpuscle of family blood. He gummed sheets of typing paper together and constructed a diagram almost the size of the drawing-room carpet. From a distance, it looked like a wild plumber’s jungle gym of gutterings and drainpipes. Close to, it was a forest of names, dates, arrows and = -signs. It might well have been a Renaissance cosmologist’s lifework, a plan of universal knowledge. It was a terrifying document. For what all the branches of the Family Tree—the seventeenth-century yeomen, the eighteenth-century tradesmen, the nineteenth-century gentry with all their fancy dress and swords and medals—boiled down to, on the bottom line, was me.
It was no wonder that the space between the parsonage and the world beyond the hedge seemed oceanic. Our voluminous ancestry made us not so much a family as an entire race. We were not to be compared to people like theWhites, or the Beales, or even the Habershons, or the Hon. Kitty Brownlow; we were more like the Norsemen, or the Etruscans, or the Phoenicians, or the Manx. No one could possibly have as many ancestors as we did—and we were on first-name terms with the lot. Had we not been impoverished country cousins, we might have dared to drop the “General” and the “Sir” from Edward’s name, along with the “Colonel” from William’s, but our claims of relationship were proved; we were kinfolks to the great.
There was good reason to believe that our clannish island was the very center of the world. God Himself had assured us of that, in so many words. If the Church Triumphant was at the heart of all things, then the Anglican parsonage was the living heart of the Church. My
Encyclopaedia Britannica
, and a faded black platoon of
Crockford’s Clerical Directories
. The Ancestors had left us the krisses, kukris, dress swords and elephant bells which hung as ornaments on our walls. We had General Sir Edward’s medals nestling in rosy velvet in their glass case, the colored coat of arms which had been granted to some Ancestor or other for a bold piece of commercial sharp practice in the early nineteenth century, along with the Ancestors’ carriage clocks, games tables, antimacassars, aspidistra bowls, barometers, walking sticks, pincushions, samplers, crested silver and old shoes. The Ancestors themselves were there too—in miniature, on ovals of ivory, in cutout silhouette, in great slablike oil portraits framed with tousled gilt. Cousin Emma sat at her writing desk. The Recorder of Bombay wore his wig. The Suffragan Bishop of some other Asian outpost looked like an overdressed doll in his clerical furbelows and frills. Colonel William … George Caspar … Tom Priaulx … The Ancestors both outnumbered and outclassed us.So much cleverer, more adventurous and richer than we were ourselves, the Ancestors were our island heritage, our history, our men of yore, and we crept bashfully about in their long shadows.
We ate our chopped meat and instant mashed potatoes off their plates with their silver cutlery; but most of their furniture was put out of bounds as too good to be spoiled by grubby contemporary fingers—fingers which had been blackened in the process of dutifully polishing the Ancestors’ rubbishy pieces of Benares brass. They were impossibly tough taskmasters, these Victorian half-pay officers and frowning clergymen and lawyers. My young father sat up late into the night working in their service, his inherited dog collar clipped over the top of his inherited shirt with its turned and darned cuffs.
“Shush, dear—can’t you see that Daddy’s busy writing the Family Tree?”
He lived—exactly as I do now—in a mess of papers. He wrote on file cards, on the backs of letters, in school exercise books, in ancestral ledgers. He had appointed himself official secretary to the Ancestors, and there was no Ancestor too obscure, no third cousin too far removed—my father took dictation from anyone in whose veins had flowed a single corpuscle of family blood. He gummed sheets of typing paper together and constructed a diagram almost the size of the drawing-room carpet. From a distance, it looked like a wild plumber’s jungle gym of gutterings and drainpipes. Close to, it was a forest of names, dates, arrows and = -signs. It might well have been a Renaissance cosmologist’s lifework, a plan of universal knowledge. It was a terrifying document. For what all the branches of the Family Tree—the seventeenth-century yeomen, the eighteenth-century tradesmen, the nineteenth-century gentry with all their fancy dress and swords and medals—boiled down to, on the bottom line, was me.
It was no wonder that the space between the parsonage and the world beyond the hedge seemed oceanic. Our voluminous ancestry made us not so much a family as an entire race. We were not to be compared to people like theWhites, or the Beales, or even the Habershons, or the Hon. Kitty Brownlow; we were more like the Norsemen, or the Etruscans, or the Phoenicians, or the Manx. No one could possibly have as many ancestors as we did—and we were on first-name terms with the lot. Had we not been impoverished country cousins, we might have dared to drop the “General” and the “Sir” from Edward’s name, along with the “Colonel” from William’s, but our claims of relationship were proved; we were kinfolks to the great.
There was good reason to believe that our clannish island was the very center of the world. God Himself had assured us of that, in so many words. If the Church Triumphant was at the heart of all things, then the Anglican parsonage was the living heart of the Church. My
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