Semi-Invisible Man

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Chapter 1 : ARABIA

"O my house, my dear little house,
hider of my little failings!”
Arabian saying

IN spring 1937 Norman Lewis spent two months in southern Arabia.
He was twenty-eight years old and had travelled to Aden at the sugges-
tion of the Foreign Office. Until March 1937 Aden had been an
anomalous pocket of British India on the Arabian peninsula, but on
1 April the settlement became a full colony controlled directly from
London. The change was dictated by the urgent refashioning of British
strategy. The Foreign Office was actively looking for ways to protect
Britain’s interests in Arabia, particularly the Yemen, after Italy’s conquest
of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in 1936 and was highly nervous of where Italy’s
gaze would fall next. The context of this nervousness was the widely
held British belief that most of Arabia, including its emerging oil wealth,
was its personal fief. The writer and traveller Freya Stark beautifully
demonstrates British anxiety in a slightly neurotic but prophetic (in
the sense that it lays out British worries for the next three-quarters of
a century) letter she wrote from Baghdad that spring to her friend
Lord Halifax: “I can’t tell you how urgent I think the Arabian problem
has become, now with the discovery of oil: as if the Bank of England
were dumped unguarded in the middle of Chicago! I hope we may
provide a guard ... and then we can talk afterwards about dividing
raw materials!”

Norman’s Arabian journey was a spying mission. He had been selected
informally for his photographic ability and tasked with documenting
the Yemen and the comings and goings of its Italian suitors at first
hand. In the event he spent six weeks at Aden, unable to find a way
into the country, though his travelling companion, a Hungarian adven-
turer named Farago, did get across the border for a brief reconnaissance
(without telling Norman or his British minders). Norman’s greatest
success on the journey was a trip he eventually made by dhow from
Aden along the Indian Ocean and up the Red Sea along the coast of
the Yemen. Back in England he turned the photographs he had taken
into an album with his own commentary, published the following year
under the pedestrian (there’s no other word) title Sand and Sea in
Arabia. Later he dismissed this book as a “deadly secret”. But his unex-
pected Arabian adventure – until then he had been a businessman dealing
in an implausible range of goods, from lost umbrellas to photographic
supplies – lodged deep in his memory. “The fact of the matter was,”
he said nearly sixty years later, “having got there I remember thinking
that what I would really like to do would be to get out there and stay
there, just drop all my responsibilities.”

Yet this was not the first time Arabia had inspired him. At the age
of fourteen or fifteen Norman had come across the idea of Arabia
somewhere – in his reading perhaps, at a time when books can power-
fully vaccinate their readers against the tedium of reality – and been
so struck by it that he had imported it into the scenery of suburban
Enfield. His first step was to dress like an Arab. At weekends and
during the holidays he “often had a knife in his belt ... a long camel-
haired coat, a tied scarf, a knife”, one of the other Forty Hill children
remembers. “The girls, the children in the village, rather struggled
for notoriety to know Lewis. He became that kind of figurehead.”
He also claimed to be of Arab origin through his mother (who was
from Carmarthen). This self-identification was not a passing enthu-
siasm. A girl who used to see him on the bus from Forty Hill to
Enfield Chase station in the morning describes him in his early twen-
ties as “a sight to behold. He was very striking [with a] sallow
complexion, Levantine ... dark hair, very dark eyes, narrow cheek-
bones and aquiline nose. He wore a long belted camel overcoat to
his ankles.”

The Arab figure evolved into a more diffuse Latin, Spanish,
Mediterranean identity but its association with his childhood self
stayed with him. On the first page of his autobiography Jackdaw
Cake, describing his perplexity at being sent to stay with three severely
eccentric aunts in Wales, he likens his acceptance of this twist in his
life to that of “an Arab child stuffed with the resignation of his reli-
gion”. And there is, surprisingly, a further perspective: he may actually
have been right. Despite the deep vein of self-reinvention in this first
impulse to dissociate himself from his Forty Hill and Enfield surround-
ings, his “Arab roots” and his Welshness may have been more connected
than they seem. Welsh has similarities with the Celtiberian language
(as does Irish), and Celtiberian culture, about whose origins archae-
ologists remain at the several-theories stage, is at least connected, as
Gerald Brenan points out, to the microlith-making of the Saharan
Capsians and the round-bellied pots of the Libyan or Tunisian early
Mediterraneans.

Real or mock, whatever the genetic soup in which the fourteen-year-
old Norman cooked and served himself, his future attraction to the
shores of southern Europe and north Africa and the islands of the
Mediterranean, to the Spanish islands of the Caribbean and the totality
of Latin America, and his attraction to Spanish, Italian and Arabic
languages, make him without doubt an honorary Mediterranean or
Levantine, even if “Arabia” in the context of early 1920s Enfield was
only a teenage boy’s emblem of romance, the farthest place he could
think of. His first edge.

Norman’s feelings of emotional displacement were also not exclu-
sively his. In an unpublished essay, “Blessing the squire and his relations”,
which is really about his father, he describes Richard Lewis too as “a
stranger in a foreign land”.

"Everything about England and the English mystified him, and he was handi-
capped in his contacts by a poor English vocabulary. ... Father found his
surroundings alien and uncomfortable. [His birthplace of] Carmarthen was set
among the green hills, littered with ruined castles and abandoned chapels. It
was a place of half-forgotten martyrdoms where Christian zealots from over-
seas had wrestled with sophisticated pagans, where a great Celtic epic – the
Black Book of Carmarthen – had been composed. Forty Hill, where he lived
in exile, had no past to speak of, and no great vestiges of power or faith.
From my father’s bedroom window he saw a flat landscape without surprises,
drawn to a dry, powdery horizon, on which the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral
sat like a grey bubble, fourteen miles away."

The details of Richard Lewis’s exile differ in the telling. In Jackdaw
Cake Norman describes his father as being driven to England by
irreconcilable clashes with his grandfather, in the unpublished essay
by economic circumstances attendant on Carmarthen’s decline as a
small port on the Tywi. In a published piece with a similar title, “God
bless the squire”, his father is referred to more positively as starting
his working life “promisingly enough in London as an analytical
chemist”. But in all his son’s accounts Richard Lewis is the same
model of a lonely estranged Welshman, his situation and character
one-part English suburban absurdity to three-parts Welsh tragicomedy.
Instead of becoming, as his son variously suggests he wanted to, an
artist, a preacher, a lawyer or a doctor, Richard Lewis trained as a
pharmacist, stepping up from managing a north London branch of
the Timothy White chemist’s chain to opening his own chemist’s shop
in Southbury Road in the centre of the prospering, still semi-rural
Enfield Town.

His first Enfield address was 3 Hampton Villas in Sydney Road, now
part of the town’s choked one-way system, its villas replaced by a
bombsite car park on one side and a lowering shopping mall on the
other. By the time of Norman’s birth in 1908 the Lewises, Richard and
Louisa and their sons David, fifteen, and Montague, nine, had removed
themselves from the expanding town centre and been living in the
village calm of Forty Hill, a couple of miles to the north, for five years.
Richard Lewis was a diminutive man, nothing like his son’s future
height, and easily excited. His limited English vocabulary, the result,
according to Norman, of a psychological block instigated by a mild
thrashing for being caught speaking Welsh at Pentrepoeth primary school
in Carmarthen, was the launch pad for a ritual of incomprehension.
“He tried to cover up the frequent gaps where the words were missing
by speaking very rapidly and filling in with a quick meaningless gabble,
and often a word or two of dog-Latin from his pharmaceutical studies.
Usually an intelligent listener got the gist of what he was talking about,
but breakdowns in communication were frequent.”

Norman’s father embarrassed him. The other Forty Hill children
found Richard Lewis a target for laughter. Gwen Nicholls, born the
year after Norman and one of the few Forty Hill children he was close
to, remembers that on 5 November "we would go round to see Norman’s
firework display. Whereas we had ours in the street and Norman would
come, Norman had to have a special one in his garden, and his father
used to entertain us far more than the fireworks. He would start talking
and he’d get so excited that he’d go off and do a foreign sort of language
which I imagine must have been [Welsh]. And Norman used to get so
embarrassed ... he was half in our world and then had this incred-
ibly contrasting world ... we were the only family who would respond to
him. All the other children rejected him."

Later, as the years and the Lewis parents’ unhappinesses intensified
Richard Lewis’s discomfort, he started drinking, and Norman’s embar-
rassment gave way to practical action, steering the Beckettian figure of
his father home and keeping him as far as he could from harm and
ridicule.

His mother Louisa was the clown’s foil. In the way of spouses, she
matched her husband’s excitability with a balancing earnestness, his
capering with an obsidian coolness. She was tall and is remembered as
oppressively mysterious, possibly the least at home of all the family in
the makeshift domesticity of Forty Hill. “While growing up,” Gwen
remembers, “there were parties on [Norman’s] birthday with a selected
choice of local children – very basic scene and fare – Mrs Lewis was
a poor cook, a sad heavy-laden person. I remember Norman whispering
to me, ‘I’ve spat in the custard’, and having to spare Mrs Lewis and
the children by my silence, and leaving an uneaten trifle.”

© Julian Evans 2008

Semi-Invisible Man

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