FAMILY MY FATHER'S FATHER was said to come from East Anglia , which at one time I took to be some remote and savage mountain or desert region .sx He was called officially Joseph James Amis , and in the family circle , sometimes perhaps with a hint of satire , known as Pater or Dadda .sx I can see him vividly as a small fat red-faced fellow with starting moist eyes and a straggly moustache which has confused itself in my mind with the 'Old Bill' style of the Great War .sx His nose had strong purple tints and , something I took to be unique to him , several isolated hairs an inch or two long sticking out from it here and there .sx He laughed frequently , with a great blaring or scraping sound of air blown through the back of the nose , but I find it hard to remember him smiling .sx I have only realised since preparing to write this how much I disliked and was repelled by him .sx Actually I saw little of him except at Christmas or an occasional birthday and that was quite enough for me .sx On one of the former he managed to give my cousin John and me one and the same tie as a present .sx A joke , possibly .sx He enjoyed eating out , with I suspect plenty to drink , and I used to admire him , if for nothing else , for sticking his napkin in the neck of his shirt , then thought a vulgarity .sx At these feasts he was a great teller of jokes , typically without any preamble , to trap you into thinking you were hearing about some real event .sx One of these horrified me so much that I have never forgotten it .sx A Scotsman ( I was still so young I had not heard about Scotsmen being supposed to be mean ) took his wife out to dinner .sx Both ordered steak .sx The wife started eating hers at top speed , but the man left his untouched .sx " Something wrong with the steak , sir ?sx " - " No no , I'm waiting for my wife's teeth .sx " I had not then heard of false teeth either , and imagined the living teeth being torn from the woman's jaws on the spot and inserted into her husband's .sx Except in greeting I cannot remember my grandfather addressing a word to me personally .sx His house and chattels were more prosperous than my own parents' ; they were situated at Purley in Surrey , quite a posh part and then , say about 1930 , semi-rural , though already , I think , connected with London by the results of 'ribbon development' .sx It was perhaps a half-hour bus-ride from our own place in Norbury , S.W.16 , half - way back towards London .sx The grandparental mansion was called Barchester , but any Trollopean overtones must have been in the mind of some previous owner .sx There were of course servants , as in any even mildly prosperous middle-class household of the time , but Mater ( no feminine equivalent of Dadda for her ) was a careful manager , so much so as to be a source of near-legend .sx It may or may not have been true , for instance , that she would leave out two matches for the maids to light the gas in the mornings :sx one match might plausibly break , so the reasoning was imagined , while more than two would be an inducement to some sort of pyrotechnic revel .sx To save lavatory paper , Mater would cut up and hang up grocer's and similar bags on a hook , and one morning my Uncle Pres claimed to have cut his bottom on the lingering remains of an acid-drop , an incident taken up in one of my novels , the artist not being an oath .sx Being unable to recall a single meal or anything else eaten at Barchester , except at a Christmas or two , I can believe that Mater avoided entertaining where possible .sx Dadda was a glass merchant or wholesaler , which meant he traded in glass or glassware , the kind you drank out of or less commonly ate off , and for years , my father told me , was doing well enough , until he began to be hit by mass-production .sx Dadda had a big line in unbreakable glass .sx This is or was of course not literally unbreakable , just unusually tough , held together , somebody once explained to me , by inner tension , and meant to survive , say , being knocked off a table on to a carpeted floor .sx If too severely struck it disintegrates in a flash , goes to powder rather than fragments , implodes with a loud report .sx It was in keeping with Dadda's style of not preluding his funny stories that he should have crept unseen into the family drawing-room one evening with an 'unbreakable' glass plate and , meaning doubtless no more than to cause a moment of wondering surprise by bouncing it across the carpet , caused it to burst in the fireplace like a hand-grenade thrown without warning .sx The incident did not shake a jokey , excitable , silly little man like him .sx Not long afterwards , holding up one of his horrible amber-brown 'Jacobean' tumblers , he asked an important American client if he would like to see something .sx When the man said he would indeed , Dadda strode to the hearth and did his hand-grenade act all over again .sx I like to think that this demonstration did its tiny bit to bring on the decline of J. J. Amis & Co. at the hands of Woolworth's .sx Dadda also figured in an attempt to obstruct or somehow muck up the marriage of Gladys Amis , his daughter and my aunt , to a Harvard professor named Ralph Foster , a distinguished scholar as I was later led to believe .sx Precision is difficult after sixty years , but my impression at the time was that the final attempt came on the very eve of the ceremony and that it was Mater's idea rather than Dadda's .sx I do remember that , summoned by Uncle Pres , my parents took off grim-faced on the fatal evening to help to talk Dadda/Mater out of their opposition .sx Since Gladys was over the age of consent , indeed over twenty-one , Ralph free to marry , etc. , the old people could not have done much beyond acting like bloody pests and spoiling everybody's fun , but no child of my age then would have found anything out of the way about that .sx The surprising part was that , as far as I could understand the situation , my own mother and father seemed to be on the right side .sx For some reason nothing to do with the personalities of those involved , it seemed much more natural to me that Pres and my aunt Poppy should have supported Gladys and Ralph .sx Anyway , virtue and sense triumphed , the marriage took place and the Fosters disappeared to America .sx Sadly soon , at the unfunny age of thirty-six , in fact , Ralph fell down dead of excitement ( " nervous heart " ) at a baseball game , but had had time to produce two children , Bobbie and Rosemary .sx Bobbie I hardly saw or remember , though Rosemary appeared with her mother on this side of the water as a girl of ten or twelve , bright and sweet but too young for my sexual purposes .sx America had figured in my life earlier , with American uncles , aunts and cousins to be seen from my early childhood , and if I took any interest in family history I might well have been able to confirm my impression that most of the ancestral Amises had emigrated there , to Virginia , in the earlier nineteenth century .sx I can recall a very Dixie-style Uncle Tom ( sic ) , probably a cousin of my grandfather's , and a cousin Uretta , whose curious name was said to have been the product of a dream .sx She called my grandmother " Aunt Ju " ( for Julia ) , and very odd it sounded in her accent .sx On my father's side I had , or was aware I had , two uncles , one unmarried , two aunts , one the soon-absent Gladys , two cousins and nobody else , and saw not so very much of them , despite the short distances involved - not so remarkable perhaps in what was still the age before the motor-car for most people .sx The only one of these likely to interest a novelist , I suppose , was my younger uncle , Leslie .sx After Dadda had performed his last noteworthy act , by dying of a heart attack ( at over seventy , but some said he was helped on his way by negligence ) , Leslie took over the care of Mater and the rump of J. J. Amis & Co. at something like the same time .sx I was content to let J. J. Amis stay out of my life , but there were expeditions to the household Leslie and Mater had set up in Surrey , a little south of Purley in Warlingham .sx I liked Leslie , the only one of my senior paternal relatives to show me interest or affection .sx He was a smallish , good-looking man , with abundant straight dark hair he kept carefully ordered , a bond between us though unintended on his part ; at that time my contemporaries and I paid enormous attention to our hair-arrangement .sx As I grew through adolescence I was able to picture his horrible life .sx His routine took him every weekday evening from the commuter station to the pub opposite , where he would tank up sufficiently to face Mater's company till her bedtime .sx After supper on lighter evenings he drove her to the same or another pub .sx Unwilling or unable to get out of the car , she would be fetched glasses of port , though whether he used to climb back aboard to drink beside her or returned to the pub for some sort of company I have never tried to discover .sx Mater was a large dreadful hairy-faced creature who lived to be nearly ninety and whom I loathed and feared in a way I had never felt towards Dadda .sx It must have been about the time of the war that my father told me , in earnest confidence , that he had been visited at his office by my uncle , Leslie .sx Dad was very grave .sx " Do you know what he told me ?sx He said he liked men .sx Wanted to [he may have brought himself to say] go to bed with them .sx What do you think of that ?sx " .sx " I don't know what to say , " I answered truthfully .sx " What did you tell him ?sx " .sx " I said , 'I take it you've seen a doctor ?sx ' " .sx Whatever any doctor might have said or done , Leslie turned out in the end not to have needed one much .sx When Mater finally died , terrifyingly late , Leslie realised what capital he had and went round the world on shipboard .sx The passage of a few years had made possible franker speech at home and my father felt able to tell me , with much amusement and fragments of envy and admiration , that , according to report , Leslie had fucked every female in sight .sx Evidently he went on doing so as long as he lasted , which sadly was not long , perhaps a couple of years .sx For some reason I have always thought this a story ideally suited to the pen of Somerset Maugham , though he would have had to leave out the detail about Leslie's phantom homosexuality .sx I could bring it in if I were writing the events up as fiction :sx the presence of Mater had the effect of removing women from Leslie's whole world , but left his libido intact and questing .sx With her out of the way , his natural heterosexual drive was freed .sx Both Maugham and I , and plenty of others , could have worked in a couple of other touches I remember .sx On being invited to a bottle party - this , I suppose , would have been in the Twenties - Leslie had asked what was entailed and was told to take a bottle along .sx A bottle of what ?sx Oh , anything .sx So in good faith he had turned up with a bottle of HP sauce .sx Then , during his Warlingham days , I noticed that he ate raw parsley in great quantities because , he said , of its richness in organic copper , though he failed to add what this compound was supposed to do for you .sx More likely it just grew profusely in his wretched garden .sx