I'm an only child: I suspect my birth may have been a surprise in a marriage of convenience that had never planned to add me to the scene. In fact, I waited six years before appearing, and then I travelled hither and yon, often alone, in three nations: as a toddler on the mid-Atlantic islands of Ascension and St Vincent, to three schools in Brazil and one in Argentina, before coming to board in England at 16. I spoke Portuguese before English, and was cuddled more by my dark-skinned and much-loved Juvita than by my mother.
I tend to think now that my father had had no intention of marrying anybody, even that were he to arrive on Earth today he'd be a fastidious and agreeable gay man. That was, of course, unthinkable in his day, even to himself – a concept that would have horrified his prim and utterly upright soul. (Mother never commented on his somewhat odd late-life hobby of dressing little cut-out dolls.)
Marriage never occurred to him until he was 27, in 1925, when his company, hinting at promotion to Brazil, suggested that "if he had marriage in mind, there was no time like the present". They allowed him three months to get it done, before boarding a ship for Brazil, stopping in Madeira for a week to celebrate the wedding.
The company was Cable & Wireless, Western Telegraph. The son of a baker, he'd left school at 14 but had energy and drive. From being the last in the telegraph chain, the lad who took them to the door, he rose to being the first, one of those who tapped them out. The company urged him on to night-school, where he excelled at morse code and learned about electricity, but they couldn't have imagined the thoroughness with which he would search for a bride during those three months.
Until then, he had apparently given all his leisure time to golf, tennis and (sedate) motorcycling – even abroad and after marriage, a bike remained his favourite photographic subject. Now, for his hunt, he acquired a huge new Harley Davidson with sidecar – but restricted it to 30mph, not only to calm the candidates (if they knew they were such) but also from an attitude he maintained towards any vehicle all his life. He must have made a plan, because he always did. Simple. Take them to lunch. Concentrate. Then choose a wife. It didn't work like that.
His Voigtländer had rarely taken pictures of people, let alone of women, but suddenly, as if he'd bought a more enlightened camera, he realised the need to spot women. He buzzed around the south, from beach to countryside, but his albums offer only tantalising glimpses, for he never did bother with captions. Numbers One and Two seem to be snapped under the same tree, though one is in sunshine, the other laughing under an umbrella. Number Three is one of 10 women in bathing suits at a seaside beauty contest, but he doesn't say which.
He took more photos of Number Four than all the rest put together. On a boat and in a field. Leaning against a tree with a cup in her hand. Tall and beautiful, she, alone of all his subjects, still occupies a whole spread in his album. I never knew who she was, nor did Mother ever mention her, but he clearly never forgot her. Numbers Five, Six and Seven, introduced by his motorbike pals – he had an army of them – are removed from his album.
Number Eight, end of the line, was Madeleine, a small dark Celt brought up in a convent, daughter of a professional boxer and national racquets champion who had changed his name from Alcock to a more decently respectable Barnes. When they met she too was 27 and the receptionist in a hotel where he had offered to deliver bread for his dad.
Her first reaction was to tell him to drive the Harley Davidson round to the tradesmen's entrance before agreeing to lunch and a ride in it. He said that he knew of a good restaurant, about 40 miles away, and he would like to visit it before going to Brazil. Yes, Brazil, the other side of the equator. Madeleine surely recognised it was time to get her skates on.
They became a good bridge pair in their expat circles, but I think cool practicality, not passion, was their suit. It was practical to send me away at seven to boarding school in England for two years, but back to Brazil when war began. And it was simply not practical to pack any toys apart from my favourite tin soldiers as we moved from Rio, Niterói, Santos, São Paulo, Fortaleza … It was later practical for Father to deliver me at 13 to St George's College, 50/50 English and Spanish, in Buenos Aires, where they called me El Brasilero. And it was simply not practical to see me in the holidays.
Although he wrote me an occasional letter, items set out like a newspaper, we didn't meet again for five years – in England, with the war over, and me by then a sixth-former at the public school to which I'd been dispatched at 16.
His practicality, his calmness, his efficiency brought him not only a wife. These qualities also raised him to be company manager of Brazil where his British sangfroid was renowned. Mother would say that if she ever showed signs of being in a hurry to move, he'd pick up a newspaper. When a submarine surfaced off Valparaiso and gunned the town, it was he who went to the beach to take photos while everyone fled to the hills. And a colleague once swore that while dashing down the stairs during an earthquake, with the house shifting sideways, he passed the bathroom and saw my father gently adjusting the mirror on the wall as he continued to shave.
Up the Amazon as much as in the home counties, Father believed in system. Every morning as he dressed, he'd call "Five!" to the kitchen from his bedroom to advise when he'd be ready for breakfast. He was a big man, but a dandy. Wanting in the heat of Brazil always to have a load of fresh underwear, especially near the equator, he declined to travel in a two-seater plane to work in Maranhão unless a similar aircraft, dedicated entirely to his extra underclothes, went with him. It was agreed. According to Mother, the little planes flapped their wings on taking off.
Mother, on the other hand, excelled herself teaching young girls to knit woolly squares, then to link them into blankets to help with the war. In 30 years she barely learned the language, but nevertheless organised a group of Brazilian ladies to make clothes for American soldiers, and pullovers for the women of the Pacific islands, to make sure they looked decent.
During his long absence, Father had been unaware of the vast social changes in his homeland: he came back like a time traveller, with his puritan conscience, speaking an archaic slang, to a country he no longer recognised. And when, on one of our rare meetings then, I told him – a man who read only for practical purposes – that I'd committed myself to a career in books and writing, he expressed his disgust by a silence of seven years. But when my first novel was published, he invited me to lunch and told me Mother had read it.
Were they ever in love? At the end, long after retiring to England, she said she wouldn't be visiting him in hospital, but I must, and would I please remember to bring back the £11 he had taken in. When he died, at 71, her only lament to me was a wistful "We were such good friends!" She herself lived on till 97, sturdily independent – famous in her 90s for hauling coal over from her neighbour's shed, who, having died himself, wouldn't need it. I never saw them as much as embrace, and a single small photo in that early album, taken by someone unknown, only makes me sad: Mother sitting on a wall, young and slim, leans in to kiss Father's cheek as, laughing awkwardly, he turns his face aside.
