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Smart Lad

I see in the Oxford Dictionary of Surnames that the name Frayn in all its various spellings derives from the French, fresne, an ash tree. We were dwellers by an ash tree, and the earliest recorded variation is a William de Fraisn in 1156, who had presumably, as some proud families like to boast, 'come over with the Conqueror'. Our branch of the family, though, arrived only four hundred years or so later, and in less exalted circumstances. We spring not from twelfth-century Norman knights but from a French pirate who was terrorising the Channel in the sixteenth century. He was captured by the English and hanged at Dover. His ship, and the cargo of gold it contained, was impounded, and both ship and gold are being held in Chancery for any Frayn who can prove his descent from the pirate.

I know this because I was told it by my mother, one rainy afternoon when I was about six. The story seized my imagination, particularly the solemnity of the phrase 'held in Chancery'. I had no clear idea of what Chancery was, but I understood that it was something to do with the law, and was dark and lofty and inaccessible. I had a picture of a gloomy panelled hall, and in it, propped on trestles, a kind of Viking longship, with the piled gold gleaming amidst the thwarts. I knew it was my task in life to reclaim it. But how would I prove that I was the legitimate heir? What tests would I be put to?

What for that matter had my father already done to secure the gold? Nothing, it turned out when I asked him some years later. The reason was simple: because he'd never heard about it. By this time my mother was no longer there to ask, but I suppose she must have made the story up to keep my sister and me entertained on a wet afternoon, just as she sometimes played the violin to us. It had never occurred to me that it didn't make any sense. Why would the pirate have had a son and heir on board with him as he raged about the Channel? Why would his ship and his illicit hoard be kept for his heirs to claim? Odd, though. The story's so circumstantial, and so out-of-nowhere. I can't recall my mother ever inventing any other piece of family history - or any other story at all.

More recently, at any rate, so I've discovered from my researches, the Frayns come from the West Country. Satisfyingly unusual as the name is in London, the nineteenth-century census returns for Devon and Cornwall are littered with Frayns, most of the men blacksmiths or locksmiths, most of the women in service. My father's father, Thomas Frayn, was born in Plymouth, the son of a general warehouseman, and rose into the world of small shopkeeping. He began his career as an assistant in a china shop, and married a greengrocer's daughter, Louisa Lavinia Allen (whose mother was illiterate - she had to make her mark when she registered Louisa's birth). Thomas progressed from working in the china shop to owning it. This turned out to be a step too high in the world, though. He apparently drank the profits, the business failed, and at some point in the last decade of the nineteenth century he brought his wife and family to London, where he found work as an assistant once more, in the china department at Whiteleys.

I can't remember now who first told me about the move from Plymouth. Not my father, who never said anything at all about his parents. I've filled out most of the details from the official records, but perhaps I got the story first from my cousin John Frayn Turner, a fellow writer. John, ten years older than me, remembered that our mutual grandmother had a rich Devon accent, and it was certainly he who first told me about our grandfather's weakness for drink. I was about sixty by then, so perhaps he felt I was old enough to be trusted with some of the family's darker secrets.

Thomas and Louisa had four children, three girls and a boy, and the six of them moved into a house in Devonshire Road, Holloway - chosen perhaps because the name reminded them of the old days. I recently took a walk round the district. Devonshire Road, now Axminster Road, is a turning off the Seven Sisters Road, part of the early Victorian development just to the east of the Holloway Road, and a cut above the slum streets that have long since been cleared in other parts of the borough. The terraces could pass for Georgian, with small front gardens and trees along the pavement - exactly the kind of street that in other districts developers have gentrified. It's plainly come up in the world a bit since my father's day, but the Seven Sisters Road and the Holloway Road, which flow through the history of the Frayn family like the Tigris and the Euphrates through the history of Mesopotamia, remain mostly working class, and I had the impression that gentrification was still rather hanging fire. I got talking to someone who had been brought up just round the corner from the house my grandparents lived in. He told me that it had always been 'a rough old neighbourhood', and he catalogued a few of the more interesting local murders.

My grandparents' house had four rooms, apart from the kitchen, and according to the 1901 census there were two other couples also living there. Presumably each of these other couples occupied one of the rooms. So my grandparents and their four teenage children must have been living in the two remaining rooms. Two adults and four adolescents in two rooms - and all ten residents, presumably, sharing the kitchen. All the Frayn children were fortunately slight, wispy creatures. And they might have been packed in even tighter. In the next census, in 1911, there's a space for the total number of children born, dead as well as living, and this records two more, born alive but with no names or birth dates.

So this was my first surprise as I looked into my father's origins; quite how poor the family had been. When he at last joined the household, on 29 January 1901, he was the eleventh human being to be fitted into the four rooms, and cooked for and washed for in the communal kitchen. They named him Thomas, like his father, and Allen, after his mother's family. Thomas Allen Frayn. Tom to everyone as a boy, then Tommy to his wife's family in the years to come, and Tom still for some reason to all his colleagues and customers. The Benjamin, with a big brother to look after him and three big sisters to fuss over him, twelve years younger than the youngest of them.

I have only one photograph of him as a baby. He's wearing a bib, and he looks as if he has just made a great discovery - the only thing that he told me about himself in these early years: if you're given bread and cheese you can eat the cheese and chuck the bread under the table. No sooner on to his first solid food than he'd discovered the first inklings of the sharpness and cheek that were going to see him through a career of salesmanship and so many of life's waiting difficulties. Parking his car in central London, for example, fifty years after this - leaving it in front of the Air Ministry and telling the attendant 'Business with the Minister', or in front of the great north door of Westminster Abbey - 'Business with the Dean'.

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My second surprise, as I looked at the 1901 census, came when I understood the significance of the final column in the return. It was to be filled in, it explained at the top, if

(1) Deaf and dumb

(2) Blind

(3) Lunatic

(4) Imbecile, feeble-minded.

And it was filled in. Every single member of the family except for the two-month-old Thomas was tagged with a (1). The entire family were deaf and dumb.

The first thing this shows is how cautiously you have to treat even the most apparently authoritative historical records. I never knew my paternal grandfather, because he died long before I was born, and I don't remember my grandmother, because she died when I was still not two, but I'm pretty sure that they weren't dumb - and absolutely sure that my father's brother and sisters weren't, because them I did know. Deaf they certainly were, all of them - Nellie, Mabel, George, and Daisy - seriously deaf; I remember the struggle to make them hear anything I said. I was surprised, though, that they were already deaf as children. My father's deafness came on in early middle age. And his brother and sisters can't have been deaf from birth, because their speech wasn't impaired.

Or perhaps Mabel's was a bit, now I come to think of it. She certainly spoke in a strangely hushed way, as if she were in church. So did Daisy. Yes, and Nellie, and George.

What they were all suffering from was presumably, as I have discovered from the internet, late-onset hereditary deafness, for which apparently the gene has now been discovered, though I'm not quite sure what's happened to it in the three generations since then. A puzzle remains, though. If it's hereditary it's not surprising that one of the parents was also deaf. But both of them! Was this pure coincidence? Or had they been drawn to each other in the first place because of their deafness?

Four deaf children and two deaf parents. This is surprising enough. But one of the other couples sharing the house with them, a draper and his wife, is listed in the same way. The draper was from Devon, like the Frayns, so maybe he was a relative with the same heredity. But his wife, from Berkshire - also deaf! Maybe they, too, had picked each other because of their deafness. Maybe the two couples had been drawn to share a house because of the similarity of their marital arrangements . Or was it all just one great escalating...