Part 2

John Fowles: A Life in Two Worlds
by Eileen Warburton

(Page 4 of 7)

Twenty-six when he enlisted as an officer in the Honourable Artillery Company, Robert saw three years of action in the trenches of Flanders. Memories of comrades dying beside him in battle tormented him throughout his life. Friends of his boyhood were slain. His brother Jack was killed in action at Ypres in 1917, leaving a widow and three small children. Robert himself was not physically wounded, but his nerves were shot. In 1919 he was sent to occupied Cologne, Germany, where he enjoyed being a military prosecutor for a year. When, in 1920, Robert Fowles was demobilized, he was thirty-one years old and, in the medical terminology of the day, "neurasthenic." His daughter sadly reported that he was acknowledged by the family to be "a mess."7 His sleep was poor, his nerves were bad, and his hands shook "so that he could not even hold a teacup."

If Robert was changed, so were his family and his prospects. In 1920 his father, Reginald, died and (Frank Fowles, the surviving older brother, being skipped over) the legally trained Robert was made executor of his father's estate. Because Robert was responsible for the children of his dead brother, Jack, and for his five young half siblings from Reginald's second marriage, the career in law of which he had dreamed was out of the question. He had to "go into the family firm" of Allen & Wright,9 and he carried the burden of fiscal obligation for his extended family until 1951. Although Robert Fowles seldom spoke of Reginald and his legacy of emotional tensions and financial woe, his son, John, came to think of his Fowles grandfather as "a monster . . . hatching children and the eggs of disaster and hatred all round the clock."

Reginald's wealthy business partner and cousin J. T. L. Tucker may have helped relocate the entire fatherless family to Essex. Supportive and concerned, Tucker, godfather to Robert Fowles, already lived on Canvey Island on the Essex coast. By 1924 the struggling young Fowles was living nearby in Westcliff-on-Sea, commuting daily to London by train. He continued to be in "an awful state," suffering debilitating anxiety and nervous symptoms, though he stoically suppressed speaking of his wartime experiences until very late in life.

Robert Fowles spent the rest of his life responding to what must have been a harrowing sense of loss. John Fowles was surprised to learn in the early 1950s that his father had sought help through Freudian psychoanalysis in 1923. This was quite a radical act at that time, both intellectually forward and, perhaps, desperate. Sigmund Freud's theories may have been known to Robert Fowles through his assignment in Germany and his readings in German, but they were only just beginning to be generally known in England. The psychoanalysis completely overlooked the obvious causes of Robert's mental distress - the savage carnage of the war, the experience of helplessly watching friends perish, the deaths of his brother and father, the crushing financial family responsibilities, and the sacrifice of his hopes. Instead, "the Freudian explanation," wrote John Fowles nearly thirty years later, "was that he had lost his mother at the age of six and had never acclimatised himself to his young step-mother." Robert Fowles never returned to therapy, but he continued to look for answers. He spent the rest of his life reading, studying, and arguing philosophy and religion, a discipline that his only son also adopted. The real remedy for Robert's illness was of a more romantic variety. Sometime in 1924 Rob Fowles met Gladys Richards at the tennis club in Westcliff-on-Sea. He was thirty- five, and she ten years younger. The lively Gladys was attractive and popular, with many boyfriends. But her other admirers suddenly seemed immature next to this responsible former officer, who had survived so much in the war. She was moved by his experiences and felt needed. Gladys's parents were a bit alarmed at her attraction to a man in fragile health, burdened with such a dependent, complicated family. He had even expressed a reluctance to have children of his own.13 But Gladys, as her son would put it, "nursed him back to health.... She was the cure."

Love prevailed. Robert Fowles and Gladys Richards were married on June 18, 1925, in the Anglican parish church of St. Saviour at Westcliff-on-Sea. Robert brought his bride home to the house they named "Waygate," purchased a few months previously. Only nine months and two weeks later their son was born there on March 31, 1926. The little boy was given the reversed Christian names of his father, John Robert Fowles.

There were two Leighs at the time of John Fowles's birth, and he was a child of historical transition. There was Old Leigh, a cockling, shrimping, and seafaring port near the mouth of the River Thames, ancient enough to have been mentioned in the Domesday Book (1085). Old Leigh sent ships to the Spanish Armada, captains to Trafalgar, and mariners to the evacuation of Dunkirk. Old Leigh was bounded on the north by the rural Hadleigh Hills and on the southeast by the vast tidal mudflats that John Fowles was to explore and hunt in and grow to love. Eastward Old Leigh looked out past the garish seaside resort of Southend-on-Sea, toward the mouth of the great estuary and the North Sea.

The "other" Leigh, Leigh-on-Sea, was a rapidly growing dormitory town created by the commuter railway to London, thirty-five miles upriver to the west, past oil refineries, docks, and factories. In 1925, when Robert Fowles bought the first little semidetached house built on Fillebrook Avenue, a cul-de-sac cut through from the London Road only the year before, the property was still part of the Chalkwell section of Westcliff-on-Sea. The Fowleses' house and the neighborhood were reassigned to Leigh-on-Sea in 1930.15 The house was conveniently close to the omnibus line and the railway station, and Robert Fowles never owned or drove an automobile.

The Fowleses of No. 63 were part of a tremendous postwar real estate development boom as Leigh exploded in population from a village of fewer than four thousand to nearly twenty thousand in less than twenty years. Building plots and houses were sold from marquee tents, and special trains brought buyers to the auctions from London's Fenchurch Street Station. Residents of new streets often endured months of wheel ruts and mud as they waited for paving, sewers, and lights. To the loss of Old Leigh, historic houses dating back to the time of the first Queen Elizabeth were demolished during the early 1920s, as main roads were rapidly widened or extended.

Yet for all the frantic construction Fillebrook Avenue retained some of its pastoral character. Prittle Brook ran four houses from the Fowleses' front door. Blooming with wildflowers, thick with "brambles, nettles and rusting detritus," bordered by a concrete runoff ditch, an open field made an irresistible playground for John and the other children, despite being declared off-limits by their parents.16 Just across the street from No. 63 were the Garden Estate Tennis Courts, where Robert played avidly and taught John to play. Spacious Chalkwell Park, with its expansive green lawns, formal gardens, and views of the sea, was a mere quarter mile from the house. Below the seaside cliffs, there were beaches along the Thames, where the Fowles and Richards families hired a tentlike beach hut each summer and spent their weekend afternoons in a sandy, sociable congregation of parents, siblings, grandparents, children, babies, and dogs.

Robert and Gladys referred to each other as "Father" and "Mother." In these capacities, they acted parentally toward their extended clan with Robert managing everyone's finances and Gladys welcoming siblings and half siblings, nieces and nephews, neighboring maiden aunts and distant bachelor uncles for meals and cups of tea. As a child John Fowles was enfolded in family, all living in the Leigh area. The Richards grandmother and Gladys's younger brother, Stanley, and his wife, Eileen, lived a few streets over. On the Fowles side, there was Robert's stepmother, Lovey, his sisters Maud, Maggie, Gertie, and Tots, his surviving brother, Frank, and half siblings Alan, Dick, Joan, Pat, and Kate. Besides Peggy Fowles, who lived with them, other young Fowles cousins were around often enough to capture John's imagination as he grew. To No. 63 came a much-envied cousin who lived in Kenya, a tea planter, big-game shot, and fly fisherman. Another eccentric cousin, Lawrence Wetherill, nineteen years John's senior and an international authority on ants, would also turn up from some exotic African adventure, fascinating his small cousin with photographs and stories.17 John was often taken to visit his father's relative and godfather, J. T. L. Tucker, on nearby Canvey Island. An eccentric, lusty fitness enthusiast who had helped to establish the London YMCA while he grew rich in the tobacco business, Tucker would cheerfully greet the little boy by knocking him flat with a medicine ball almost as big as he was.

To safeguard the security of this rosy family world, Robert Fowles bore the anxiety of a shaky commercial enterprise. Each morning he joined his commuting neighbors as he walked five minutes up the street to the London Road, then a quarter hour down the steep hill to the Westcliff-on-Sea railway station near the Thames to ride an hour to Fenchurch Street Station, then cross London to Piccadilly Circus. Each evening he retraced his journey after spending his workday as managing director of Allen & Wright, Ltd., maker of briar pipes and purveyor of fine tobaccos. John Fowles recalled growing up "in the scent really of rather nice tobacco," the imported Havana cigars, the "rare, expensive . . . scented" cigarettes from places like Russia and Egypt, "the English cigarettes like Richmond Gems, and the house mixtures rolled by Allen & Wright."18 In truth, however, it was "a luxury trade in an age of slumps and restrictions."19 So many people also depended on the profits that there was never much gain. Some of the finances sustaining the extended Fowles family came from rentals of the other London business properties. Additionally, Robert Fowles owned a small amount of stock, which he monitored carefully.

© 2005 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Eileen Warburton is a scholar who lives in Newport, Rhode Island.