Father Dear Father

by Petronella Wyatt

  A Continental family-feeling pervaded all that Henry Bath did. Certainly the British upper classes usually displayed a coldness towards their children more in keeping with pre-Revolutionary France. But Henry was not daunted by the behaviour of the rest of his peers. At any rate Bath decided on a course of action that would kill two birds with one loan. He made over Longleat to his son, thus avoiding punitive death duties and a life spent in ante-rooms for his restless heir.

  The reward of Henry’s selflessness was a small mill on the outskirts of the estate. Virginia Bath smilingly and uncomplainingly set about making it liveable. It became more than liveable, it became a demi-paradise. From the windows one could catch a glimpse of golden blossoms of a laburnum, whose branches seemed hardly able to bear their lovely burden. Now and then birds threw shadows on the silk curtains, producing a kind of magic-lantern effect.

  The air of conspicuous conviviality that had so refreshed Longleat blew more strongly still through the rooms of the mill. Soon Sunday lunch there was a regular occurrence; an occasion which Father and Mother joyfully anticipated. Something out of the ordinary was likely to occur and it usually did.

  Henry’s tastes were graciously decadent. Father and he loved to speak of that poor drunken Georgian squire, John Mytton. Mytton’s life, according to Edith Sitwell, was spent in ‘running like an ostrich, racing, jumping, driving, hunting, chased always by a high mad black wind’.

  In the last fifteen years of his time on earth half a million pounds slipped though his hands, largely due to expenditure on foxhounds and pairs of breeches. The strangest episode in which Mytton was involved, and the one that tickled Bath and Father greatly, was that of the nightshirt and the hiccups.

  Father would recite in a tremulous voice from Mytton’s biographer Nimrod:

  ‘You have read that somebody set fire to Troy, Alexander to Persepolis, Nero to Rome, a baker to London, a rascally caliph to the treasures of Alexandria, and the brave Mucius Scaevola to his own hand and arm to frighten the proud Lars Porsena into a peace; but did you ever hear of a man setting fire to his own nightshirt to frighten away the hiccup? Such, however, is the climax I have alluded to and such was the manner in which it was performed.

  ‘“Damn this hiccup,” said Mytton, as he stood undressed on the floor, apparently in the act of getting into his bed; “but I’ll frighten it away”; so seizing a lighted candle he applied it to the tab of his shirt and, it being a cotton one, was instantly enveloped in flames.’

  In the subsequent mêlée, Father continued, two brave men knocked down and rolled upon the squire in an attempt to put out the flames. Eventually they managed to tear the burning garment from Mytton’s body. As for the hiccup, it was frightened away.

  ‘The hiccup is gone. By God,’ declared the squire triumphantly, as horribly burnt he fell into bed.

  Both Henry and Father thought this a capital wheeze. Once, when Father caught the hiccups, he suggested to Henry that they try it for themselves. Father got as far as lighting the cuff of his shirt before Mother snatched away the match and in a fury doused his sleeve in champagne, the alcoholic properties of which were not enough to increase the conflagration but, rather to Father’s disappointment, put it out. It did, however, cure him of the hiccups.

  Another potentially perilous incident was the episode of the silver. Viscount Weymouth’s friends were of the unpredictable variety; it might be said that some of them were less likely to have their names inscribed on family trees than to be found hanging from them. They were like black panthers. Not so much the hunters as the hunted, they, and Longleat was often their lair.

  One of these creatures was a gentleman whose connections extended to the criminal world. He had indeed been convicted of a series of burglaries in the South of France.

  It was his practice to arrive at Longleat in a private helicopter. From Henry’s lunch table its whirring could be heard in the distance, gentle at first, then like a swollen torrent through an open sluice. The Marquess’s response was both instantaneous and dramatic. In the cold light of retrospection it was even a little exaggerated.

  ‘For Christ’s sake hide the silver,’ he cried. He pointed to the candlesticks, ashtrays, goblets and cutlery. But where were they to hide it?

  ‘Under the table, of course,’ he roared. ‘There’s no time to lose. He’ll be here in a minute.’

  Sometimes gracious and comely figures people an era, to give way at last to a lesser breed of men and women. Father’s generation seemed to have the added music of passion; to convey their thoughts and characters from one to another as if they were sharing in a subtle and magical perfume.

  There were those who became prominent politicians. Now dead, perhaps today they are hurrying to some phantasmal parliament.

  It is often said that the Muses and the Graces are seldom found together. But they were on visiting terms in my godfather Julian Amery, the Conservative politician and philosopher, who married Harold Macmillan’s daughter Catherine. Julian was a traveller of the mind and of the spirit. All that was known of his early life was glorious. At Oxford he served Château Latour and plover’s eggs in his rooms. His gestures were languid, meant to disguise a cobra alertness. He was remarkably attentive to the decoration of his person. No cravat was too bright, no suiting too elaborate for his sense of the dramatic.

  During the Second World War, however, Julian’s interests underwent a startling change. The British government dropped him into Albania as an agent. It was a defining moment, like Warren Hastings’ arrival in India or Kitchener’s first sight of the Sudan. At once, the exiled Albanian royal family became his beau-ideal, despite the unromantic truth that at old King Zog’s coronation pigs and cattle snuffled smellily in and out of the cathedral defecating on the floor.

  After his return to England Julian’s entertaining took on an exotic dryad-like aspect. Occasionally I was invited to lunch. Amery owned one of the few houses (as opposed to flats) left in Eaton Square. One rang the doorbell to be greeted, not by a butler, but a large stuffed tiger. It glared with frightful yellow eyes, looking like a baleful Eastern god. In its forehead was a monstrous spinel.

  The hall was always dark, as was the rest of the house. This contributed to the air of conspiracy and cabal that hung about the place. Julian was always putting together a group of people who he hoped would overthrow the government. It did not seem to matter which government. Julian was wilful. He had wild ideas of seizing power. He tossed them into the air only to have them evaporate into a wistful mist. He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life based on the ordered principles of Imperialism and an almost holy exaltation of the senses.

  After a while Julian’s Albanian habits became a source of irritation. A native-style goatee beard was carefully cultivated. He started to receive his guests from his sofa, at strange hours, like a king at his levees. Sometimes he would say little, but just lift his eyelids as if they were the wings of a great bird. He developed a distressing habit with regard to wine, mainly practised at other people’s houses. Mother could only sob in despair after Julian opened a bottle of burgundy, sniffed at its neck and then, without explanation or preamble, poured a quarter of it onto her Persian rug, a gift from some Saudi princeling.

  When Mother protested, he roared at her as if she were an imbecile. ‘Don’t you know. Albanian precautionary manoeuvre. Gets rid of any big black flies on the surface of the wine.’

  As the barometer was set cold, the house was insulated from animals of any kind and the wine had come straight from an auction at Sotheby’s, the likelihood of it containing big black flies was remote. In vain did Mother wail, even though, as she pointed out afterwards, ‘If anyone poured wine on one of Julian’s carpets he would call the police.’

  Then there was, and still is at the time of writing, the enchanting Marquess of Anglesey. He was a man upon whom the good fairies seemed to have showered all their most precious gifts. Few minds were swifter or rarer; fewer still were found enclosed in such a magnificent
body. Wearing Napoleonic uniform, in which he sometimes posed for photographs, Henry became a word-of-mouth female myth. A talented draughtsman and painter, he used to communicate with his friends through a series of drawings with a riddle posed underneath each one.

  His ancestor was the fabled Lord Uxbridge whose leg was lost at Waterloo. You will recall how after a blast Wellington turned to his friend and said, ‘My God, Sir, I think you’ve had your leg blown off.’

  Uxbridge looked down.

  ‘My God, Sir, so I have.’

  Later, when the Duke showed the Prince Regent around the battlefield, the future George IV seemed distracted.

  ‘Are you bored, Sir?’ Wellington asked. ‘Not at all,’ replied George with presence of wit. ‘I was looking for Lord Anglesey’s leg.’

  Wild spirits, like fauns of the forest, ran in and out of my childhood. Few had more of the untameable about them than Arthur Koestler, the tormented Hungarian philosopher.

  In form and face he was from another age, a medieval Mongol rider of the plain. Father thought he was incapable of lasting happiness. Koestler was a former Communist, something with which I think he struggled to come to terms. Occasionally his relentless remorse obliged him to walk out of Father’s dinner parties declaring that the guests invited, who included the Labour politicians Tony Crosland and Dick Crossman, were too left-wing. Later it was claimed that this lack of savoir faire was extended to his dealings with women. Whether this was true or not, his treatment of his lovely wife Mamaine (a swan among swans) was, as Koestler himself described it, ‘Hungarian’, and as everyone else said, despicable.

  There was George Brown, who could be counted on to insult just about everybody, and Maurice Macmillan, Harold’s comely and gracious son, who became Father’s Tory pair in the House of Commons. Maurice wrote me humorous poems about a mussel I had found one summer in the Mediterranean sea.

  And the writers. Ian Fleming, who told his wife that he couldn’t make love to her because it caused his hair to fall out, would talk to Father about his other sexual proclivities, which he sometimes translated into his books:

  ‘Women like a good walloping, Woodrow,’ he would remark, ‘that’s what the success of James Bond showed.’

  Ah, women. In his friendships with them Father preferred intellect to beauty. Women with brains are not always presentable – look at Simone de Beauvoir or Julie Burchill. Father’s dear Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal, however, was a gem among gems; the equal of Audrey Hepburn, Garbo or Gwyneth Paltrow. A perfectly pristine presence, she had that dual quality that is often possessed by men and women whose appeal crosses sexual frontiers.

  The brilliant and witty Liz Paget (a relation, coincidentally, of Henry Anglesey) married young to an Austrian aristocrat called Raimond von Hofmannsthal. Raimond was the son of Richard Strauss’s librettist. He was nicknamed ‘lover’ for the alleged effectiveness of his tackle. It was rumoured that an American matron of a famous Boston family offered to pay one million dollars to find out if other women were lying when they said Raimond could make love six times a day and never come.

  When Raimond died, Roy Jenkins urged Father to marry his lovely widow. But Liz was planning far beyond the Wyatt family. Her sights were set on princes. Alas, her prince never came, but she carried the dream before her like a banner. When I met her in the early 1980s she was dying of cancer. Yet she remained eerily unaltered from the previous decade, still thinking of maharajas and grand dukes. Her eyes were the colour of Adriatic waters. Her hair, silvery-white, was brushed forward, fitting her head like a beret. She leaned over the sofa, touching my arm with light fingers. ‘I loved your dear father,’ she said. ‘But he was the worst kisser I ever met.’

  During the 1950s Father saw a great deal of Robert Heber-Percy, who was descended from the Harry ‘Hotspur’ of Henry IV. A Puck in mufti, he kept on his Oxfordshire estate one hundred doves which he had dyed pink, yellow and blue, so that they appeared in the sky like a broken rainbow. Then there was Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press lord, who offered Father a column in perpetuity if he (Beaverbrook) could sleep with Father’s wife, and once confided that there was a moment during the war when he thought he might have to seize power from Churchill.

  Another superlative brain was Lord (Victor) Rothschild, who during the war had defused German bombs with tools made for him by Cartier. Father and I lunched with Victor at his house in Cambridge the day the newspapers accused him of having been ‘the Third Man’ in the Burgess/Maclean spy ring. (That he had been a friend of Burgess was indisputable, but then so had Father.) Victor played Art Tatum on the piano with a careless air, but his conversation was bitter-tinted.

  ‘How can they make these accusations?’ he asked wretchedly. ‘No one loves this country more than I do.’

  Before we left he took Father’s hand and said sadly,

  ‘God, I wish I’d never been introduced to Burgess.’

  I was fortunate enough to meet most of these men and women. But one who made the greatest impression upon Father I never knew. Nor was he English. Raymond Chandler once wrote of one of his heroines, ‘there are blondes and then there are blondes.’ This is even truer of statesmen. There is always something wrong with them. They are either undignified and awkward or too aggressive or too anodyne. But none of this was true of a man who, during his retirement in London, if only for a brief moment, became a treasured companion to Father.

  At the age of thirty-one Alexander Kerensky had ruled the whole of Russia, only to lose it to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. When he entered Father’s life he was elderly and frail, handsome in a touching way; a bundle of recollections surrounded by dignified regret. Like many Russians he could be maudlin. He tormented himself by returning again and again to how he might have prevented Lenin’s coup.

  ‘I should have shot him, I should have shot him. I knew where he was,’ the old man muttered over his half-drained cup of tea.

  These were astonishing tales outside the pastures of even the cognoscenti. Later he remarked to Father that such was his desperation in the months leading to the Bolshevik take-over that he considered offering the Russian throne to our Duke of Gloucester.

  Once he had recovered from his surprise, Father retorted,

  ‘No, old boy. You should have given it to Queen Mary. She would have made a most appropriate Tsarina.’

  When in 1970 Kerensky’s mortal spirit left this earth Father wept.

  But it was not the last he heard from the Russian. A few weeks after his death Father received something in the post. It was an autographed copy of Kerensky’s memoirs. When Father opened the book, out fluttered a piece of paper on which were inscribed the words, ‘All things pass. Even evil ones.’

  20

  Father throws his kippers out of the window

  IN THE SECOND half of that peripatetic decade the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher was at the glorious – to some vainglorious – acme of her power, any visitor to our house in Cavendish Avenue in the spring or summer might have chanced to see a portly white-haired man, bereft of all garments save a pair of yellow boxer shorts, seated on his garden bench regarding with concentration the contents of a tray balanced on his lap.

  The visitor might justifiably have assumed, from a perusal of those contents, that the man was either engaged in some fantastical scientific experiment, or was an amateur geologist inspecting his more outlandish findings, or perhaps he was planning to embark on a horrible series of mass poisonings. For, arranged on little saucers, some accompanied by a teaspoon and a glass of water, others by only a fork, were potions, powders and concoctions, edible and otherwise, of every possible hue, texture and colour.

  A man of a distinct atheistic bent, Father had long ago decided to sublimate his urges for immortality in a more tangible deity than the one offered by the Christian church. As he became older the God of his hearth took on the complexion and shape of vast amounts of preventive medicine and health foods. He worshipped these household spirits with increasing voraciousness,
receiving as tablets from Olympus their doses of wisdom in the form of myriad periodicals, pamphlets, faxes and announcements, spewing these papers all over the house and the garden like heavenly detritus.

  Father’s dietary habits were fantastical in the extreme. He would eat neither butter, cream, sugar, milk nor anything he believed to contain those inventions of Satan known to man as saturated fats. These, he was convinced, had been invented solely for the purpose of his physical destruction, leading to coronary attacks and cancer. He had a particular horror of butter, regarding it in the way one imagines a nineteenth-century missionary to have viewed the severed chicken necks of Voodoo death ceremonies. Every Friday, after Mother had returned from her weekly food shopping expedition, there were howls of wrath from the Portuguese lady cook as Father ransacked the kitchen in search of a pat of the dreadful stuff (which he felt sure Mother had secreted out of sight).

  Father’s eccentricities permeated our relations with the outside world to an embarrassing degree. When Mother received in the post Cornish clotted cream from the Earl of Falmouth, a neighbour of my uncle, Father was torn between the natural human instinct of gratitude and the firm conviction that if the Earl had sent a letter bomb it could not have been more deleterious to our family’s well-being. In the end the latter feeling triumphed and the cream was duly sent to the Little Sisters of the Poor in Kilburn. I was puzzled by the way in which Father’s customary humanity seemed to have been subsumed. Didn’t he mind if the Little Sisters of the Poor contracted coronary disease and died? Father was scornful. He rolled his eyes at Mother as if to apologise for having bred a daughter of such slow wits.

  ‘Ignorant child,’ he chastised me. ‘It’s not for them to eat. I thought they could use the pots to keep their rosaries in.’

  Meals in our house were, to say the least, unusual. Mother struggled with little success to construct menus around Father’s rigorous prohibitions. Most lunch and dinner dishes, including soups, stews and puddings, turned out to contain one or other of the proscribed ingredients. To my horror Mother tried to conjure up edible dinners around porridge oats (highly acceptable to Father, containing as they did unsaturated fats), mineral water and Hermesetas artificial sweetener. My youthful conventionality rebelled against these new and unsatisfactory meals. For a while supper en famille was conducted in sullen silence punctuated by the occasional breaking of wind that invariably signalled chronic indigestion on my part.