Derek Jarman: A Biography

3. Buried Feelings

3 Buried Feelings By 1947, although the war had been over for two years, its effects were still being strongly and unpleasantly felt in England. Despite victory and the determination of the recently elected Labour government to start a new social chapter in the country’s history, the process of adapting to peace was slow and painful. It is a mere detail, but not long after the Jarmans returned from Italy, Lance was invited to lunch at Blenheim Palace. That evening, Betts and the children were agog to know what it had been like. What had he been given to eat? The answer was distressingly simple: Spam. The family had travelled back from Italy on a ‘storm-tossed troop ship’.1 With Bloody Little Joany still in attendance, they had gone to stay in Northwood with Moselle. They were not the only prodigals returning home. After a war spent presumed missing, but actually enduring unspeakable horrors in a Japanese POW camp, Betts’ brother Teddy was also back in Northwood, married to his first wife Pegs. Moyra was working for her flamboyant Aunt Doris in a boarding house behind Harrods, later moving to nearby Mount Vernon Hospital, where she would meet her first husband. For the first time in almost ten years, the Puttock family were reunited and able to bear witness to the after-effects of the war as they related to Lance. Lance’s ascent through the ranks of the RAF was continuing unabated. On his return to England in July 1947, a month before his fortieth birthday, he had been promoted to group captain and given a posting to RAF Oakington near Cambridge, where he was put in charge of transport. Yet although the future held some exciting challenges , the particular excitements of youth and war were a thing of the past. Lance was now shouldering the responsibilities of a young family on RAF pay and in the bleak surroundings of life on the ‘patch’. Italian opulence had been supplanted by a mildewed Nissen hut ‘filled with thick suffocating coke fumes and running with . . . condensation’,2 Lake Maggiore by an old yellow dinghy on the lawn, smelling strongly of rubber and filled with hose water. As Jarman later explained, with no forays to make into enemy territory , Lance’s temper, never placid, spilled into the domestic arena. The person with whom he most often clashed was his son; ‘so elegant ’, according to his Aunt Pegs, ‘so full of fun with his little twinkle in his eye; a really go-ahead little boy’. Their fights were principally over food. Jarman’s persistent refusal to eat certain things maddened his father beyond endurance. It was the start of a titanic clash of wills. Though the father, with his military bearing, was the more obviously powerful of the two, there was an equal, if more subtle, thread of steel running through the ‘elegant’ son. Mealtimes became skirmishes that could also involve Gaye. The story is sometimes told about Jarman but, as Aunt Pegs remembers it, it was Gaye, then four, who was fiddling with the salt cellar when Lance told her to stop. She refused. Although it was winter, he lifted her out of the window and left her in the cold until sufficiently chastened. Then came the night Jarman’s ear was hurting. He was in bed, crying. There were guests for dinner. His wails disturbed them. Lance strode down the passage and beat the child until he fell silent. The next day, Derek was still in pain and the doctor was called. It was discovered he had an abscess in his ear which needed to be etherised and drained. In the Puttock home-movie footage of a family meal, if one looks carefully one can see that the film is inadvertently running Buried Feelings 21 backwards: food is being regurgitated instead of ingested. The images we have of Jarman family life need similarly careful scrutiny if one is to appreciate the darkness lying behind a generally bland and blameless façade; to see that little Dekky was being traumatised by his clashes with his father; that doting Moselle sensed this and would never forgive her son-in-law for his actions; that it fell to the ‘always smiling Betty’ to keep the family peace, a role at which she became painfully adept over the years. In January 1948, Lance was posted as commanding officer to RAF Abingdon...