Father Dear Father

by Petronella Wyatt

  A few months earlier Mother had engaged for me a Scottish nanny called Diana. Under her patient tutelage my attempts to sing became tolerable to the ear. Together with some of my schoolfriends, who impressed more than I with their dynamic abilities, we began to put on makeshift performances of musicals.

  These would have been more bearable to both the cast and their families had Father not decided that ‘opening nights’ be attended by an audience of the sort that usually graced a West End premiere.

  I suppose he imagined that I would appreciate a degree of verisimilitude, for one evening he announced triumphantly,

  ‘I’ve found a real critic to watch you perform.’

  ‘Who might that be? Mother?’

  ‘No,’ said Father smirking. ‘Bernard Levin.’

  Bernard Levin! One of the most ferocious journalists in England! Things became worse. It turned out that Father had also invited a well-known theatrical producer, and for the sake of social glitter he had thrown in the Duke of Devonshire as well.

  It was a nightmare from start to finish. Father had many impossible hopes for his children, but after that evening he slowly became disillusioned about my chances of becoming a great star of the stage.

  This was not before my career as a performer reached its apotheosis or, more accurately perhaps, its nadir.

  It all began with my father’s friendship with the Macmillan family. Maurice Macmillan, the son of Harold Macmillan, was a Conservative MP and Father’s pair in the House of Commons. For an Englishman he evinced touches of the dandy. Bright silk cravats, canary-yellow trousers; shell-pink shirts; nothing was too loud to be displayed through Maurice’s elegant frame as the height of taste. His high poetic nature was particularly appealing to a young girl. The adventures of my pets – which ranged from the commonplace to the outré – were chronicled by Maurice in iambic pentameters. This spurred Father on to poetic efforts of his own. One morning he announced proudly the composition of an ode to my ginger cat, which had been christened, for want of inspiration, Poo. It went like this:

  Petronella’s Poo Cat

  Petronella’s Poo cat

  Wore a Yellow Goose hat

  When she Pulled its Tail

  It began To Wail

  She didn’t mean It Harm

  But caused It Some Alarm

  Stamping on Its Toe

  Crying ‘Ho, Ho, Ho’

  Poo Was White and Ginger

  Liked to Nip Your Finger

  Only Just In Fun

  Then away He’d Run

  Petronella Loved Him

  But she Hit and Shoved him

  Thought that cats were Toys

  Tough like Little Boys

  When she Learned to stroke Him

  Not just Kick and Poke Him

  Gently smooth His Fur

  Poo began to Purr.

  Maurice thought this wasn’t at all bad; at least it was better than anything written by his father. It was not long before they decided to introduce me to the venerable Harold. Macmillan was a legendary figure in my childhood. He was portrayed as a cross between Edward VII and Cardinal Wolsey.

  This was not far off the mark. In those days the former premier made a stately progress between two country houses, Highgrove in Gloucestershire and Birchgrove in Sussex. Highgrove later became the property of the Prince of Wales. When we stayed there in the late Seventies it was a plain granite affair reached by a drive that turned off the main road. The house was bordered by neatly kept fields. Its uninterrupted theme was chintz; chintz of every shade and pattern covered the furniture like lakes of intricate colour.

  Birchgrove, on the other hand, was a house that might have been conceived by Heathcliff in one of his blacker moods. One reached it after traversing a gloomy gravel road that wound in and out of woodland so dense that the sun only occasionally penetrated the leaves. The house itself was square and austere, yielding nothing up in the way of human warmth; the rooms hinted of goodness knows what mysteries and entrapments.

  But the garden. What a garden! Brooks played hide-and-seek with mossy moots; bright flowers burst irresistibly through the crevices of marble temples; lakes sat still and silver in the summer dusk while gem-like dragonflies glittered above their brilliant surface. It was a garden that haunted one’s dreams.

  Not surprisingly, Birchgrove was Macmillan’s preferred residence. It suited his extravagant personality. My childhood meetings with the old man were like audiences with a demigod or centaur. One stumbled through them in terror lest something displeased his cobalt eye and he blasted one away with a thunderbolt. Later, however, I came to see him more as a figure of his own invention; alternatively whimsical, sentimental and overbearing, like a character in a drama. I think he liked to play up to this role. He would straighten his already erect carriage when one entered the room and adjust his voice so that it moved between the sternly prophetic and the ingratiating, yet with an unspoken margin that one never exceeded.

  With Father, however, Macmillan had a more confiding relationship. He enjoyed talking to him about the remarkable men and women he had known throughout his life. With schoolboyish glee he recalled how John F. Kennedy once asked him why ‘English girls like to take it Turkish?’ He chortled, ‘Kennedy was presumably thinking that as an old Etonian I understood these matters.’

  With regard to John Profumo, so resigned was Macmillan to the vagaries of history that the scandal seemed no longer of any real account. He merely commented, ‘That’s what happens when you put a Harrovian in power – look at Winston.’

  When Macmillan approached his eighty-third year, Father came up with a wheeze (Father had more wheezes than an asthmatic). In other words he dropped a bombshell. A special song was be composed and recorded in honour of the great man’s impending birthday. It dawned slowly that the person who was to compose and record it was I.

  The only song with which I was familiar at that time – apart from ‘Craven A’, which even Father deemed unsuitable – was another novelty number. Entitled ‘There was an old Man of ninety-two’, it concerned a tramp who owned a pair of dirty socks that kept flying into people’s mouths.

  On the surface the task appeared simple. It was but the work of a few minutes to change ninety-two to eighty-two. Nevertheless I could not rid myself of misgivings. The song seemed to have undertones of tendentiousness, at times of downright vulgarity. There was a verse about the Pope of Rome drinking gin that was unlikely to be to everyone’s taste.

  On we pressed nonetheless. Diana played the song’s accompaniment on the piano and I sang the words while Father operated the tape recorder. Then we played it back. The operation appeared to have been a success. The fruit of our efforts was duly delivered to Birchgrove with a note congratulating Macmillan on his birthday.

  We did not hear of the former premier’s reaction for some time, which was just as well. Nerves play cruel tricks on the mind, robbing it of precious cargo. It was only after the package had been sent that I realised I had forgotten to substitute Macmillan’s true age. The old man, apparently, did not take this kindly. Moreover the song’s references to smelly socks were interpreted as an insinuation that he seldom availed himself of the artifice of toilette. I am not sure that Macmillan ever quite forgave us. He later told Margaret Thatcher that Father had never realised his potential in politics because of an incurable lack of diplomacy.

  13

  The stately homes of Cornwall, or Father insults Oliver Cromwell

  MY PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER was from a Cornish family called Lyle, who appear to have made and then squandered a small fortune in tin mining. They must have been fairly disreputable, as one Victorian ancestor was involved in the first breach of promise case in the British Isles. He was, needless to say, the defendant. Over the years familial appetites had been transfigured into more sedentary passions, such as gluttony. Father’s Great-Aunt Molly ate rare beefsteak for breakfast until well into her eighties, ignoring doctors’ warnings of the dangers of chronic dyspepsia, whi
ch would have been in any case indistinguishable from her usual turn of mood.

  The family lived near Helston, in a granite manor house called Bonython. Bonython was a place where dreams were made. The usual vista of bricks and mortar had been transformed by the architect’s hand into a construction with lines as clean and pure as a Clichy crystal. What charms the memory treasures: picture windows that not only lent a magical translucence but set off to perfection the treasures that lay within, chief of which was a spiral staircase leading from the hall to the floor above.

  Great-Aunt Molly relied on architectural rather than horticultural features for her effects. Though the gardens around the house were copious, flowers were allowed in it only if they were dull enough not to attract attention to themselves. In short, she hated strong colours; which led one of her younger and braver house guests to devise an ingenious practical joke. For weeks he beavered away in his room constructing fake flowers out of wire, papier-mâché and cardboard which were then painted in garish reds, yellows and vermilions. In the middle of the night he crept out of the door bearing these monstrous creations and planted them at highly visible points around the garden.

  Doubtless due to a recalcitrant piece of beefsteak, Great-Aunt Molly delayed her morning perambulation until midday. But when she finally stepped out of the front door, her shrieks could be heard all the way to Helston. To make matters worse, the Lord Lieutenant was expected for lunch, and when he arrived, he was treated to the curious spectacle of Aunt Molly, whose girth was by no means inconsiderable, doing a sort of tribal dance by a bonfire heaped with coloured petals of cardboard.

  Father spent the first ten years of his life breathing in the sea spray and the Cornish air – particular in its crispness and sweet odour. He would have liked to have owned Bonython himself, but being the younger son – my uncle Robert was older by three years – this was a vain aspiration. Indeed Father’s inheritance shrank from being negligible to being nothing after he became a Labour MP. My grandmother viewed socialists as almost below murderers on the human chain. ‘There is no such thing as an “ism”,’ she said to Father indignantly. ‘Especially socialism.’ When he riposted, ‘What about Conservat-ism?’, it caused him to be written out of her will altogether.

  One of the things, as a child, I liked best about Bonython was that it seemed immemorial. In a little glade three miles from where the drive turned right towards the sea a ghostly Cavalier and Roundhead fought an endless duel to the death. The Lyle family had, like most Cornishmen, been Royalists, and the Duchy resounded with souvenirs from this most pernicious of struggles. The land around the Lizard bred eccentrics. Down the coast lived an old man whose household companions were different species of monkey. The larger ones were dressed as miniature Edwardian boys and the smaller as ingénues from Colette. They ate at table with the old man and I believe he even tried to teach them Cornish, though his death in a fire along with his monkeys precluded any serious study of this linguistic experiment.

  The jewel of that part of Cornwall remains St Michael’s Mount, the family seat of the St Levans. What a piece of work that was! It rose from its pinnacle of earth like something organic, part of and melded to the Cornish sea. Its every stone spoke of romance. In the halls, gas jets blossomed like evening primroses in their thick bell-glasses, while windows looked out onto a tiny private chapel. The regal scale of the place was leavened by the wild beauty of its setting.

  At low tide one could walk across from the mainland. Otherwise Lord St Levan’s guests arrived like Henrician courtiers, by boat. A great excitement was raised when builders restoring a pew in the chapel discovered beneath it a wooden trap-door. There below was a small chamber containing the hunched skeleton of a man whose height was six foot four. This giant had used the chamber as a hiding place, only to be forgotten – or betrayed – and left to the first instalment of Hell on earth.

  The present Lord Levan, John Francis Arthur St Aubyn, had the noble mien of Lord Marchmain and the soul of Puck. His cheekbones were so high you could have hung washing from them. If any Englishman could be descended from the senators of Old Rome it was he; so much the very prototype that foreigners pointed to him as an example of what the British race was still capable of. A scholar, a gentleman, an amateur historian, a kind and generous soul, a popular landlord and Deputy Lieutenant of Cornwall, he was well spoken of by everybody.

  Father first took me to St Michael’s Mount when I was fourteen. I remember the day well because he was suffering from a bad cold. When Father had a cold he never had it quietly. His groans were of the most darkly dramatic nature. He sneezed with such a roar that you could feel it halfway across a large room. Poor Mother was on this occasion enlisted as an itinerant nurse, following behind us with a huge and bulging box of handkerchiefs. When we set out it was low tide, which did nothing to assuage her fears of trudging on foot a mile out to sea on moist sand. Muttering imprecations against the English, Mother trailed behind our little party like an unwilling camel.

  She had a point. Climbing the path up to the castle was like traversing a perpendicular cliff. Its sharp declivities, slanted back at an angle usually only to be found in Tuscany, seemed to bring a remote echo of Roman terraces below pagan temples. In sensible walking shoes it took half an hour, but in Mother’s, which might have been designed by an imaginative misogynist, it took almost double that. On the way her burden got the better of her and she jettisoned the box of handkerchiefs into the sea, where they floated like snowflakes.

  If Lord St Levan minded our unintentional lapse of manners he did not show it, and we were greeted with a friendly if distracted air. It turned out that our host was in the throes of despair. Amongst the most treasured objects at the Mount were four pairs of cannon that magisterially pointed out over the bay. These cannon had been taken from a French frigate during the Napoleonic wars, and were not only worth £4,000 apiece but occupied a place in local legend similar to the Elgin marbles. A painting of this petit Trafalgar was on display on the castle walls as a warning to any who presumed on the St Aubyns.

  With woeful countenance Lord St Levan related how, a few weeks before, a yacht flying the French colours had anchored in the bay below the Mount. The following morning one pair of cannon were missing from their cradles. ‘Those damn Frogs,’ said Lord St Levan. ‘They must have climbed up the hill and pinched them during the night.’ The loss wounded his family pride; it was as if Napoleon had come back to life and tweaked him on the nose. ‘Send the commandos after ’em,’ was Father’s suggestion. He added, ‘And while you’re at it, put a policeman at the foot of the Mount to deter a second attempt.’

  Lord St Levan perked up at this: he did not positively glow but his features resumed their usual mellow cast. A tour of the castle was proposed, which I took up with alacrity. Father said he would stay and talk to Lady St Levan, so we left him there happily smoking a cigar.

  Lord St Levan was an indefatigable tour guide. Some of the apartments were approached down break-neck stairs; one room contained only a series of gothic cupboards in cypress wood, with elaborately carved borders and with a fretwork cornice. The four-poster beds, rare examples of their kind, were of particularly narrow construction, with the mattress boards built at least three feet off the ground. Getting into them was like climbing into a horse’s saddle with the aid of a mounting block.

  After the cannon, there was one other object dear to Lord St Levan’s romantic heart. When Oliver Cromwell had visited the Mount he left behind his napkin. An unusual souvenir of the Commonwealth, it was displayed in a case in one of the halls. St Levan chattered on about it in an ecstasy of anticipation. He became quite misty-eyed and his words ran into each other. ‘Cromwell . . . Commonwealth . . . beautiful cloth . . . white as snow still . . . never been used since of course . . . priceless’ mingled together like the rhythms of a chant.

  As we walked towards the glass display case, my own sense of excitement nearly equalled his. It appeared that I was on the point of witnessing one
of the great artefacts of history, such as the Rosetta Stone or the temples on the Acropolis. But when we reached the sacred table on which it had rested for centuries, my host let out a cry. It was gone. It had vanished. There was no napkin to be seen. Desperately we scrabbled on the floor, hoping it had fallen there, but it had definitely disappeared. As we wandered mournfully back to the drawing room Lord St Levan looked like an elephant whose bun had been stolen from him. We bade him a sad little farewell on the castle steps and made our somewhat perilous descent to the sea.

  Father remained uncharacteristically silent throughout our homeward journey. Occasionally his face took on a shifty look, as if he were struggling with some secret burden of shame. Usually he took a mystical view of his misbehaviour, as if some particular and unexpected virtue resided in it like a djinn in a bottle; but in this case there was no pleasure there. It appeared as if he were going to burst into tears.

  ‘Oh, Woodrow, for ’eaven’s sake, what is the matter?’, asked Mother, dropping consonants in her agitation. Father clung mutinously to his silent anguish but began to pull a dirty piece of cloth from his coat pocket. In the mind’s eye there was something familiar about it. It looked like an ancient napkin.

  It was an ancient napkin. It was Cromwell’s napkin. I looked at Father sharply. The napkin had accompanied Cromwell in perfect safety throughout his turbulent life, it had survived floods, storms, every vicissitude of history, everything nature could throw in its path. But it still had to pass the test of meeting Woodrow Wyatt, and that was too much for it.

  Father sniffed. ‘It was all your mother’s fault,’ he said crossly. ‘I had to blow my nose on something.’

  14