Father Dear Father

by Petronella Wyatt

  To show that he was one of the people, Gandhi insisted on travelling third class. But how could the British allow this frail old man, clad only in a sliver of cloth, to be squashed, possibly to death, in a third-class carriage?

  They could not, obviously. So whenever Gandhi notified the authorities that he intended to take a rail journey they had to lay on a special train. This had three third-class compartments, as clean, shiny and pristine as a Mayfair debutante. In the middle of one Gandhi sat with two or three close companions. In the other two the rest of his entourage rode in some comfort. At the stops en route, the enormous crowds, impressed by this apparently spartan mode of transport, cheered him to the skies. At the end of the long journey, say from Calcutta to Madras, Gandhi would turn to his secretary. ‘Now, you must find out the third-class fare and send it to the British government. We mustn’t be beholden to them for anything.’ So the Indian Railways, in return for a train journey costing nearly a thousand pounds, would receive a few rupees and acknowledge their receipt as full and final settlement.

  Nor was Gandhi averse to a little duplicity in frightening British governments with prolonged political fasts. He sometimes proclaimed they would ‘fast unto death’ unless he won a satisfactory concession. Suffering would come first; glory after. He would go for weeks without eating and the government would grow more scared every day. Father once asked him whether his fasts were not a dangerous risk. The British after all might not always respond in time.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, with a smile like a basking snake. ‘I really fast for health reasons and feel much better afterwards. I always have a little orange juice every day. I can last indefinitely.’ He glanced down at his lean and gleaming body, glowing like polished wood. Then he looked at Father, already plump though only twenty-eight. ‘I think you could do with some fasts yourself,’ he said, and emitted his high-pitched ‘hee, hee’. It might be said that Gandhi pioneered for westerners the process nowadays known as ‘detoxification’.

  Decades later, in the 1980s, Sir Richard Attenborough made his film about Gandhi, which won an Oscar. Father was exercised when he heard about it, saying, ‘We must go and see it at once.’ Accordingly, we set off for a cinema in Notting Hill Gate. Father settled himself into his red plush seat with a sigh of anticipation.

  ‘Now you’ll see the events that your old dad was a part of,’ he said.

  This jubilation was short-lived. The part of Gandhi was played by the British actor, Ben Kingsley. After about half an hour father asked in a bemused voice, ‘But where’s Gandhi?’ One was at a loss to understand.

  The figure of Kingsley in a white loin-cloth dominated the screen. ‘But there’s Gandhi.’ Father stared. He flushed darkly. ‘That’s impossible,’ he said with shuddering horror. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  The couple in front of us had turned their heads and were struggling between contradictory feelings of irritation and curiosity. With the dawning consternation felt by a commander when he loses control of an infantryman I observed Father struggling to his feet. ‘That man can’t play Gandhi,’ he cried out. ‘His chest is covered with thick black hair. Gandhi’s chest was utterly smooth.’

  Stern counsels prevailed upon him to sit down, but he jerked up abruptly when the action on the screen moved to Amritsar, where General Dyer had, according to Attenborough, deliberately massacred a crowd of peaceful Indian civilians. It would be an understatement to say that Father didn’t approve of this interpretation of events. As the British guns mowed down cowering women and children he could be restrained no longer.

  He began to roar, ‘What utter rubbish. Lies, lies, anti-British lies. That fellow Attenborough ought to be shot! It never happened like that. I should know. I know India. I was bloody well there.’

  By this time the audience had become less interested in the film than in Father and his furious outbursts. Then a Pakistani gentleman of considerable years called out from two rows behind us, ‘Are you Woodrow Wyatt? I read about your time in India in your autobiography. Jolly good stuff.’

  ‘I should think so,’ returned Father, who was gruntled by this sign of public acclamation. Thence began an animated conversation about Partition which eventually continued on the street when a number of patrons complained of the distraction.

  A few months later Father was at one of those London cocktail parties frequented by shiny media sorts, when somebody observed, ‘Oh, there’s old Attenborough.’

  Father wheeled around. He gnashed his teeth. In a trice he had his victim by the arm.

  ‘So you’re Attenborough.’

  Attenborough could not deny it.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Well what you said was absolute balderdash,’ said Father, warming to his theme. ‘I know far more about the subject than you do.’ ‘Indeed,’ said Attenborough politely, the hard set of his jaw belying the affability of his smile. But once Father started, there was no surcease.

  ‘All that aggression – complete nonsense. It wasn’t like that. And as for the hairy chest, an utter bloody fabrication. There wasn’t a hair on it.’

  Attenborough could bear this onslaught no longer. He raised his eyebrows derisively.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, but there is a great deal of hair growth of a very thick variety.’ This was followed by the mysterious addendum, ‘Especially in the winter months.’

  It was only afterwards that father was informed that he had been addressing the wrong Attenborough. Not Richard at all, but his brother David, the eminent naturalist.

  7

  Father and Churchill

  WHEN FATHER BECAME a Labour MP in 1945, he was elected member for Aston at the age of twenty-six. He was the youngest member of the House of Commons. Of all the allurements this illustrious chamber then held out for the fervent cast of mind, the most compelling was the presence of Sir Winston Churchill.

  It was 1 August, shortly after Labour’s momentous election victory. The Commons met in the House of Lords, their own chamber not yet having been rebuilt after its destruction by bombs during the war.

  The loss of the election had been a great shock to Churchill. His veering moods, and the courageous attempts he made to quell them, were a wonder to all. When the vanquished hero came in to take his place in the chamber, the Tory benches at once rose and began to sing, ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow!’

  Father, who was sitting almost catty-corner to the defeated statesman, scrutinised his face. Having at first borne the expression of a benevolent troll, it suddenly crumpled with emotion.

  The hiatus was brief. A Government MP leapt up and started to roar out the words of ‘The Red Flag’. The ranks of Labour, overflowing onto the Opposition benches, as they were to do more than fifty years later after Tony Blair’s own landslide victory, joined in. The exhilaration of the moment seemed unsurpassable. Father said that it was one of the most dramatic seconds of his life.

  The Commons appeared to Father a more significant place because Churchill was in it. Visitors at the back of the gallery stood up when Churchill came in to take his seat, and those in the front peered over the railings to have a closer look. Serried ranks of Members turned and murmured to each other in low voices, ‘Here comes the old man.’

  They visibly sharpened up, trying to anticipate from their perusal of that huge face what he would do to alter the tenor of the afternoon. Churchill’s was not an impassive face, Father recalled. It was a canvas for his multi-coloured palette of moods, of which he was never ashamed. Sometimes his eyebrows would meet like the wings of a great eagle and he would scowl fiercely at a Member who had said something unusually refractory.

  Like a child he would withdraw into a fog of sulkiness if the Speaker prevented him turning a question into a speech. When he was about to make a joke, his eyes would kindle like beacons to warn everyone to prepare for it. When he wrongfooted his opponents there would be an impish grin of triumph. He was willing to shed a tear, and often did so in that age of less hyperbole but more honest feeling. />
  Like puppies aping the master, many young MPs tried to copy Churchill’s tricks. During the early years of his political career as a Labour MP, Oswald Mosley had adopted one of the first Churchillian principles of party politics: find a famous man and attack him. It was inevitable that this invention, should be turned against the inventor. Nye Bevan had achieved a degree of notoriety by challenging Churchill.

  Father, who was a man of bold adventure, at once comprehended the merits of this approach. His first opportunity came in November 1947. Churchill opened for the Opposition against the Labour government’s proposal to give independence to Burma. An old-fashioned, amorphous imperialism was in his blood. He spoke against the idea with venomous vigour.

  Years afterwards, Father liked to quote from Churchill’s speech, uttered in his inimitable drawl:

  ‘We stand on the threshold of another scene of misery and ruin, marking and illustrating the fearful retrogression of civilisation which the abandonment by Great Britain of her responsibilities in the East has brought, and is bringing, upon Asia and the world. I say this to the Government: we shall have no part or lot in it.’

  When Churchill sat down, Father leapt to his feet in a ferment, and threw away his carefully researched notes. He spoke extemporaneously with passion and a cutting logic that decimated Churchill’s arguments one by one. He pointed out what no one else had dared, that when Churchill’s own father, Lord Randolph Churchill, as Secretary for India, annexed Burma in 1886, the first Governor he sent there said annexation was unnecessary. Instead, quoted Father, ‘a protectorate would have sufficed just as well, or a treaty arrangement.’

  The House was amazed by this impertinence, but its collective intake of breath only exacerbated Father’s excitement and his determination to continue. He was going like a steam engine at full throttle.

  Where, he thundered, was R. A. Butler, the Tory expert on India and Burma? He was absent because he did not agree with a single world of what the Right Honourable Gentleman had just said. (Butler, chairman of the Conservative party and architect of its victory in 1951 a few years later, told Father the next day that he was quite correct and congratulated him on opposing Churchill’s outdated imperialism.)

  When he sat down, the Commons was in uproar; some horrified, others dazed by Father’s presumption, some convinced that the man who had just spoken was a future prime minister.

  The time will come, the young Disraeli had once said, when you will listen. For Father the time had come sooner than he or anyone else could have predicted.

  It was only after the first haze of euphoria had evaporated that Father became thoughtful. He had presumed to cast stones at the temple. How could he face again that clear gaze, reproachful in its sad divinity?

  Later that week the encounter took place. Churchill was in the smoking room. He was pouring himself a tumbler of gin in a slow, deliberate manner.

  ‘Mr Wyatt,’ he growled.

  Father quailed.

  ‘That was a very good debating speech.’

  Father mumbled something about hoping that he had not been too rude. He ground to a halt.

  ‘I ask for no quarter,’ Churchill replied.

  He paused. ‘And I bear no malice.’

  How could Father not love such a person?

  Churchill was an admirer of singularity, and in the young MP he recognised the shading of a piquant individual. The pair developed a friendship that began to resemble that between Dr Johnson and James Boswell.

  Father inundated him with questions. What was this? Why was that? What had happened when such and such had occurred?

  One one occasion Father asked Churchill what Stalin was like. He sought pause for a minute, before saying in a voice that sounded like a tyre rumbling down a rough road, ‘Amiable enough in a rough sort of way.’ When I asked him what had really happened to the Kulaks, he answered, ‘They just disappeared, just disappeared.’

  Churchill was touched that after illness had kept him away from the Commons, Father chanced to ask him the first question on his return:

  ‘Is the Right Honourable Gentleman aware that when he is away the magic goes out of the House?’

  He reciprocated by making Father the receptacle of numerous confidences. One morning they were standing side by side in the Commons lavatory about to have a pee.

  Churchill motioned to his crotch and remarked mournfully, ‘Poor little bird. It can’t even hop out of its nest anymore.’

  Soon invitations came to dine at Chartwell, his beloved county house. Sentimentality ran like a vein through the host, sometimes to the detriment of the guests. On one occasion there was no dinner after Churchill recognised the bird on the carving board as a chicken to whom he had taken a personal fancy.

  ‘I can’t carve up an old friend,’ he declared.

  The carving knife was replaced with a mournful clang.

  Father used to remark that one of the greatest sorrows of Churchill’s life was his unresolved relationship with his son Randolph.

  Randolph had the gall and arrogance of his family but few of his father’s diplomatic skills, while his undoubted talent was often confined to charm and conversation. A slight man with questing eyes, by then he was divorced from the fabled grande horizontale Pamela Digby, later Pamela Harriman.

  If he didn’t like you, Randolph could be very rude. He was once asked to address an agricultural meeting in the country. He arrived in epicene apparel more suited to waltzing at the Ritz than to the rustic gavotte. It was soon quite clear he had not bothered to master the details of his subject. Finally a farmer rose to his feet and roared,

  ‘You don’t know anything about farming. I bet you don’t even know how many toes a pig has.’

  Randolph riposted, ‘Take off your boot and count them.’ Father was fond of Randolph, but bemused and impotent when faced with his jealousy of his parent. Once, after Randolph had walked out of Chartwell, Churchill turned wretchedly to Father.

  ‘You know, Woodrow, hate is a terrible thing.’

  The trouble was, said Father, Randolph could never grasp why when Churchill bullied and insulted famous statesmen they responded humbly and amiably, but when he needled them they bristled with rage.

  Father’s sparring with Churchill in the Commons continued. After the Tories returned to power they had an explosive row about guns (puns, you will have noticed, are the least of my literary vices). Father was opposed to Churchill’s choice of the Belgian FN rifle over the British-invented EM2 rifle as the replacement for the old bolt-operated gun that had been in standard use in the Army.

  As Under-Secretary of State at the War Office, Father had got to know the gun’s inventors and attended trials.

  The experts agreed that the British rifle was the best semi-automatic one; before Labour left office in 1951 the decision had been made to manufacture this British product. It was hoped that NATO would standardise on it. But jealousy in America was pushing the powerful US influence against it in favour of the inferior Belgian rifle. Churchill, who had once more become Prime Minister, was capitulating for political reasons. Father began to harry him.

  He could have evaded Father’s questions by passing them back for answer to Anthony Head, the Secretary of State for War, but he enjoyed their exchanges. In any case Head was a nervous man; he seemed to be little more than a cipher.

  Before the election there had been some uncertainty whether Head would be made Minister of Defence or Secretary of State for War. The following morning, the telephone call came for the overwrought man to speak to Churchill.

  ‘Anthony, I’ve decided on war.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ the panic-stricken Head replied. ‘Against whom, sir?’

  Eventually Father provoked Churchill into taking part in a debate, a rare concession for a Prime Minister. Father moved the official Opposition motion deploring the government’s decision to adopt the Belgian FN rifle in place of the new British EM2 on 1 February 1954. Father accused him of falsifying the facts to rationalise the
decision, which was really due to his not being able to persuade President Truman to accept our rifle. Churchill had fallen back on such facile arguments as that the Belgian model would look smarter on parade, and that its butt would be more effective in hand-to-hand fighting.

  ‘The Prime Minister wants to meet the new jet-age with the butt end of a rifle,’ Father mocked.

  Churchill was irate, but his humour did not leave him entirely. That morning he had arranged for a party of MPs to fire the British and Belgian rifles. In the chamber afterwards he observed drily,

  ‘I must admit that the Honourable Member for Aston did not allow his prejudices against the Belgian rifle to prevent him from making a most remarkable score with it this morning.’

  It was the only time Churchill ever congratulated an MP on his marksmanship, the more remarkable because Father was usually a pitiful shot.

  The following year Churchill was gone from office. He took up a mute, listening role with a lollipop hearing-aid in the chamber he loved.

  ‘I am a child of the House of Commons,’ he told Father. Not for him the titular baubles of a Chatham or a Beaconsfield. He remained a man of the people in the proper meaning of the term. To Churchill the greatest suffix a person could have after their name was the two letters, MP. Father agreed with him that they were the most glorious in the English language.

  8

  Father becomes Lord Bradwell’s lavatory attendant

  DURING THE SIXTIES, one of Father’s closest friends was the notorious Labour minister, Tom Driberg, later elevated to the peerage as Lord Bradwell. Elevated though his position may have been, his thoughts and behaviour were not. Driberg was a showy, many-coloured homosexual who was alleged by some to be a Soviet double agent. Father always doubted this, however, pointing out that his wild shouts, startling indiscretions and rampant promiscuity would have been too great a risk even for the Russians.