My Father's Fortune by Michael Frayn Read Free Book Online

he effortlessly sends the best that the Australian bowlers can come up with away over the Nursery End …
    There’s no sign of the dog in the photographs, nor in my conscious recollection. In a jealous fury, apparently, one day while the family’s out, it attacks my cot and tears the bedding to shreds. My parents feel that they must make a choice between dog and son. They choose the son, fortunately, and the only trace of the wirehaired terrier that remains in our lives is deep in my unconscious, the cause, as I suppose, of the otherwise unexplained fear of dogs that I have suffered from ever since.
    The departure of the dog must reduce the pressure on accommodation a little. And perhaps, now that the future batsman has come along, the additional presence of the batsman’s grandmother doesn’t seem quite so onerous. The availability of a live-in children’s nurse to help change the England captain’s nappies (particularly one who is as devoted to him as they are themselves, and who is too nervous ever to want to go out) is beginning to show an unforeseen return on Tommy’s tolerance.
    Soon, in any case, they’re moving out of the flat into a house– and even further out in the suburbs. Plenty of other young families at the time are doing much the same, of course, which is why London is growing so fast in those two decades between the wars. The slightly odd thing about the move that Tommy and Vi are making, though, is that it’s to the south-western suburbs, on the other side of the Thames. They have both spent their entire lives in North London, and North Londoners regard South London as a foreign country, a vague tangle of unmapped streets where only missionaries and encyclopaedia salesmen venture. Movingsouth of the river must feel almost as adventurous as moving to the Southern Hemisphere.
    How does it come about? Well, Tommy’s already working for a firm just beyond the river in Southwark, and travelling the inner boroughs round about for them. Which means that he’s broken the psychological barrier of the river – and also that he must have a car. I have a hunch that they’re out for a spin in it with the baby, perhaps for a day by the sea on the south coast, perhaps just to the Derby on Epsom Downs, and that they get stuck, like everybody else, in the mile-long traffic-jam that used to build up in Ewell Village on summer weekends in the twenties and thirties before the bypass was built. And that, as they sit there in the blue haze of exhaust fumes, they find themselves gazing into an estate agent’s window with a sign that says the kind of thing that local estate agent’s signs do at the time: 
    LIVE IN SURREY, FREE FROM WORRY!
    Modern Homes in Old-World Ewell!
    Where the fresh breezes blow straight from the Surrey Hills! Chalk upland soil! Detached residences available, erected upon approved principles, and finished to a degree of perfection!
    From £ 975. Deposit £ 50. Monthly £ 5 18s. 9d.
    However they happen upon it, one day early in 1935 they’re moving in. They’re not, of course, in spite of all the tempting offers in the local agents’ windows, buying the house. They’re renting, just as their parents rented before them. They have signed a lease with Stanley Charles Longhurst, a timber merchant in Epsom, at whose circular saws I later found myself labouring one summer for £ 3 a week (under-eighteen rate). The rent of the house is seventy-eight pounds ( £ 78) per year; which, as anyone as quick at arithmetic as Tommy would instantly see, is approximately the same as he would be paying in instalments on a mortgage. Far though they have ventured into the wilderness of suburban South London, though, they have not gone completely native.
    What more can a man want, if he has a house, a garden, a beautiful wife, and a son who will one day open for England?
    A daughter, obviously, to complete the archetypal family.
    On