Land of lost content

Tom Frayn, says his son Michael in this admirable memoir, trod lightly upon the earth. He belonged to a class and a generation who didn’t think their story mattered. Even his profession — he was an asbestos salesman — has ceased to exist. At the request of his own children, who felt that they had ‘risen from an unknown place’, Michael Frayn has collected the few scraps of evidence and pieced together this unobtrusive life.

His father was a ‘smart lad’, youngest of a family of seven housed in two rooms off the Holloway Road, and the only one not born deaf. (He suffered hearing loss later, but, characteristically, used it to enhance his comic timing.) Tom’s wit and charm found plenty of customers for his toxic wares. He moved his family to a detached house with a big garden and an Austin saloon in the garage. Respectable interwar Sutton was a far cry from the grime and grind of Edwardian Holloway. There were (ghastly) private schools for young Michael and his sister Gill, unused decanters for port and sherry on the sideboard, and annual holidays in Bridport or Newquay.

Nevertheless, Tom developed ‘very little middle-class sense of material possession’. The house was rented, the car went with the job, money for school fees dried up — releasing Michael to the more civilised, though less prestigious, grammar school. When he died, Tom Frayn left no will, £1,500, a small cardboard box containing all his worldly goods, and a memory of his ever-cheery smile.

The book’s title is ironic. Fortune, in the obvious sense, didn’t much interest this humorous, dapper, uncomplaining man, and it doesn’t much interest his son either. What does intrigue Michael Frayn is his father’s legacy of influence, his role in shaping Michael’s own fortune, as a writer and as a father.