by Jon Pertwee
*
A certain morning at Highleigh in 1935 when I was fifteen, pushing sixteen, is forever engraved on my mind. I was sitting on the terrace when the post arrived, and there was actually a parcel for me. Excitedly tearing it open I revealed a cardboard Easter Egg containing a very handsome wrist watch.
‘Cripes!’ I said, looking at it admiringly. ‘Will you look at that! I wonder who it’s from? There’s no card or letter with it.’
‘From your mother, I expect,’ said my father.
I stood stock still.
‘You mean “D”?’
‘No, I mean your mother.’
‘But, I haven’t got a mother,’ I protested. All my life I had believed that my mother was dead.
‘Well, you have, and she must’ve sent you that watch. I suppose that it’s time you and she met.’
‘B-b-but, who is she, I mean where does she live and all that?’ I stammered.
‘You can find that out for yourself, I’ve no wish to get involved.’
And with this unexpected bombshell duly dropped, my father turned and walked back into the house.
I sat staring at the watch, as it zoomed in and out of focus, trying to make some sense out of this shattering piece of information. It was too much for me to take in. I have no recollection of discussing the matter with either Michael or Coby, so I can only assume that they were not there, and this was a subject that I certainly could not discuss with ‘D’ I thought, probably quite mistakenly!
After all, a child’s estimation of an adult is fundamental. It is a black and white opinion without any of the concessions we make in later years. Basic feelings like love and hate are still undisguised, for the young child has not yet learned to reason with the habit of mind.
When my father married Dorothy and she became my stepmother, I hated her from the bottom of my childish heart. I missed Granny, her warmth and her love, and I resented ‘D’s’ efforts to discipline me, to bring her own blend of order into my life, which up until then had been such a happy one. And when committing that classic boner of taking my father’s side in an argument with ‘D’ I found myself in no-man’s land!
Like most adults, my father strongly resented my immature but loyal interference. It is hard for me to say whether ‘D’ tried to replace the mother I didn’t have because I never got to know her well enough.
Later, after her divorce from Roland, when I was a young man and living on my own, I saw her from time to time. She appeared to be an assertive, strong-willed woman who vigorously believed in her own convictions. If it hadn’t been for the memory of those bleak childhood days, I feel that given time, I might have got to like her very much.
In the circumstances, all my tangled and confused brain could come up with, was to get to Granny as soon as possible and ask her. This I did, and as usual she was wonderfully tender and understanding. It seems that she had been in touch with Avice, my mother, ever since the divorce. This was remarkable when you consider my grandmother’s Victorian upbringing and her strict adherence to the moral code. One would have thought that following the dreadful scandal the case had caused in the press, she would have ‘cut’ my mother completely out of her life, as she expected her son Roland to do. But possessing the character she had, she swallowed her pride and with great humanity, kept in touch with my mother, informing her regularly of her two small sons’ progress. Granny was most patient in her explanation of the break-up and even opened up her deed box to get out all the press-clippings for me to read.
However, my father being a private man, preferred to leave his private past undisturbed, and my only real knowledge of my parents’ divorce stems from my father’s autobiography, Master of None. With great sensitivity he described his return from the war and the vague intuition that all was not well, followed by the stark realisation of his wife’s affair with one of his best friends . . .
Avice was still asleep when I woke next morning. It was my habit to shave in L’s room [La Garde’s] which adjoined ours. As I opened his door, a folded page of a Walker’s Loose-Leaf Diary, at the instance of a draught, fluttered past my feet. I thought it was the page on which I had scribbled the list of snapshots we were going to take. So I stooped and put it in my dressing-gown pocket. L, too, was asleep, and I stropped my razor and soaped my chin without waking him. In those days I used to shave with a knife, and a knife has to be wiped on something. The little packet of papers which hung by the washstand had been exhausted the day before, so I took the Walker’s Loose-Leaf from my pocket to wipe the razor on. The leaf was folded down the centre, and when I opened it I found that it contained a few words in Avice’s handwriting. Except that they told L she loved him, I do not remember them.
I have often tried to reconstruct what went on in my head at that moment of discovery. I am very sure, however, that anger had no part in it. I remember standing looking at him with an open razor in my hand. But I had no thoughts of doing him an injury. In some indescribable way he had become a new person – a stranger about whom there was an extraordinary interest. Something which I had believed to be wholly mine had passed into his keeping. Or hadn’t it? I don’t think I even bothered to reach out after that straw. Avice was much too serious to stumble into a trivial love affair. I knew beyond hope that she now felt for him what once she had felt for me.
Granny and I talked it over until the early hours, and I could see how bitterly she felt that anybody could have walked out on her handsome, talented son and his two little boys. It was something incomprehensible to her and would forever remain so. Louis de la Garde was a viper in her bosom, and should have been stamped under foot, but, she begrudgingly admitted, he did seem to make my mother happy, ‘and that was something, not much, but something.’
My brother Michael had evidently already made contact and was seeing our mother fairly regularly, but Granny thought it better not to involve him in my first meeting. At least I thought that this was to be our first meeting but I was wrong.
Over the years a mysterious Mrs Guard, introduced to us by Dad as an ‘old friend’, had periodically come to Number 86 for tea. Usually ‘tea’ for Dad was nothing but a cuppa, and a digestive biscuit, to be enjoyed privately in his study during a fifteen minute respite from work. But when Mrs Guard came, Michael and I were invited down to join them. Then tea was an occasion remembered principally for its fare, rather than its guest, for there were sandwiches, biscuits and pastries on these visits. Not knowing that this pretty, fine looking lady was our mother, we couldn’t understand the reason for being summoned to the presence, and spent most of the time stuffing ourselves rather than talking and answering the poor woman’s agonised questions. Things that she desperately wanted to know seemed to us ‘boring’ and ‘typical of grown-ups’ and not worthy of much consideration when answering.
Questions like ‘How are you enjoying school?’ ‘Do you two get on well?’ ‘My goodness aren’t you tall?’ and ‘Aren’t you like your father? were too stupid and obvious to be worth our attention. The first question worth answering was ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ ‘An actor, of course.’
It did occur to me that Mrs Guard’s attention was focused more on us than on her ‘friend’ Roland, but that didn’t cause me any suspicion, and never for a second did I think that the lady anxiously and nervously sitting before me was my mother. Once tea had been consumed, the beano was over as far as we were concerned and we couldn’t wait to leave and return to the fascination of a caught mouse or some such divertissement.
But now the moment had come for a confrontation and, armed with the address of my mother’s house in the country, I set off to find her.
She was an elegant, attractive woman, slim, with gently greying hair and sharply chiselled features. She walked like a dancer, but wasn’t. She was more than a little startled to find me standing before her, but after the initial shock had worn off welcomed me with joy, loving hugs and promises of great future happiness. Sadly, this happiness never quite materi
alised, as I found it hard to accept that she had not made sufficient effort to enter my life earlier and although she proceeded to spoil me rotten, I could somehow never think of her as my real mother, only as a rather friendly aunt.
She lived in a beautiful Elizabethan manor house in Holtye near East Grinstead. There was a wirehaired terrier of great sagacity and character called Jim, and a friendly duck called Quacker, who left permanent cards on the Persian rugs.
My mother’s brother Keith Scholtz was a dapper disaster. His life had been fraught with failure from the outset, but it never seemed to get him down.
With very little money, he managed to effect the appearance of an affluent member of society. His grey flannel trousers, of which he had two pairs, were always immaculately ironed and pressed; his tweed lift jacket, of which he had one, never showed a crease, and his dinner jacket was frequently rubbed with sandpaper to keep down the shine. To top off the ‘Born in the Purple,’ effect, he sported a monocle on a string, and liked to be addressed as ‘Captain’, a slightly upgraded legacy of World War One.
Uncle Keith was a charmer and in his day considered something of a masher with the ladies, but somehow, no matter how hard they tried, none of them managed to get him to the altar. This was probably just well, as he was a man very set in his ways and would’ve driven his wife to distraction.
He used to regale me with wonderful stories of his life with my mother in South Africa, where my grandfather, Doctor Scholtz, had I believe been Cecil Rhodes’ personal physician. The doctor had been a secret emissary between Lord Roberts and President Kruger during the Boer War, and I still possess a fascinating collection of letters that they wrote to each other. Reading between the lines, the good doctor seemed to be walking a very thin line between being an emissary and a spy!
Uncle Keith said that when he died, he would leave me not money (for his position as a cinema manager was not the best paid of professions), but his one good lung, which he said should be worth a fortune from all the gold dust he had sucked into it, while working down the mines.
As he liked to tell it, his other lung had been removed years before to pay off a long-standing debt. In truth, he had stayed down the mines too long, and had developed chronic silicosis.
His one great claim to fame was that he had been a member of the Magic Circle. There was nothing he liked to do better, than to stupefy me and my friends with his close-up magic, including one trick which I’ve never seen done before or since.
As I remember it, I took a new, sealed pack of cards, thrust a table knife through its paper wrapping, and separated the pack into two piles, face down on the table. The Captain would then name the two cards on the bottom of each pile. Now that was magic! As to me, my Uncle Keith was a magical, lovable, useless old rogue, and I loved him!
I thought I would hate my mother’s husband, the infamous Louis who had appropriated her when I was a baby; on the contrary, I liked him enormously, and could see straight away what had attracted my mother to him. He was then the Managing Director of the big Lex Garage chain and extremely well set-up financially. With this beautiful house, a large staff and a flat off St James Square sw1., Mother and he led a very comfortable existence.
Louis, who, when in a reverie, unconsciously twiddled his hair into a long, ‘narwhal-like’ spike at the top of his head, was of French birth and liked to live like a Frenchman. Tall, slim and elegant with iron grey hair, he and Mother were a pigeon pair. Remarkably, despite the disparity in our ages, we were of identical build, so Mother, noting the indifference of my garb, took me to their London flat and searched through Louis’ cupboards like a dog after a buried bone for my new wardrobe. There were suits from Hawes and Curtis and Huntsman, shirts and ties from Turnbull and Asser, shoes (hand made) from Lobbs and hats from Scotts. I was the best dressed young blade in Britain and it did my stock in the eyes of the young ladies a power of good. Louis seemed quite unconcerned that this stranger in his midst was stripping his cupboard bare; if it gave Avice pleasure, that was all right by him.
The sweetness and light was not to last however, for one day when we were out shopping I noticed something in a window and called out, ‘Mother, Mother, look at this.’ She stopped dead in her tracks, fixed me with an icy glare, and hissed, ‘Never, but never, call me Mother in the street.’
That night I lay in bed, trying to see her point of view. I was probably expecting too much. After all, two near adult sons had suddenly come into a life that until then had been without any encumbrances. After those initial introductions of ‘Jack, Phyllis, this is my youngest son, Jon,’ and the ensuing platitudes of ‘No really? He can’t be, you’re far too young to have such a big boy’, she realised that the admission of our existence aged her in the eyes of her social circle.
For my part I had desperately wanted a mother to love, and be loved by, all my life. To find her and be rejected by her (for it was a form of rejection) was irreconcilable. From that day forward our relationship trod a rocky path, culminating in her refusal some years later, to allow me to sleep on a sofa in her little cottage. (Louis’ death had left her in much reduced circumstances.) I was in the lower-deck of the Navy at the time and my cousins and some other relations were staying in Mother’s cottage for Christmas. On asking where I was to sleep, Mother said, ‘In the pub in the village.’
‘I’d rather sleep on the sofa, so we can all be together,’ I said sentimentally.
‘No, dear, in the pub and you’re to have your breakfast there as well.’
I was pretty miffed. After all, I thought, I am her son, and I wouldn’t even mind sleeping on the floor! In the Navy I was used to that. But she would have none of it. The next morning, arriving with gifts, I banged on the cottage door and loudly demanded that the portal be opened to admit Santa Claus himself.
‘Is that you, Jon dear?’
‘No, it’s Santa, bearing gifts,’ I replied rapidly losing confidence in my assumed identity.
‘Yes, well it’s a bit too early, go back to the pub, have your breakfast, and come back again in a couple of hours.’
From then on our affiliation deteriorated to one of little else but ‘keeping in touch’ and the very occasional visit.
I was in Australia in 1948 when I received a telegram saying that she had died aged sixty of a heart attack. She was much missed by many friends who loved her dearly, but I would be hard put to it to say that I genuinely felt as a son should feel when his mother had died.
Chapter Three
‘The whining schoolboy with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school.’
I must now go back over the years, and fill in the gaps between holidays. My childhood was not entirely filled with wrestling matches and Devon hunts, alas. Let me tell you that I was the most unwilling creeper on whom you could ever clap an eye! Not that I disliked school – I loathed it! Passionately! It would be lovely to tell you stirring tales of prefect Pertwee the Pride of the Prep, or Pertwee minimus, the Hero of the House. But I did not win through. In fact the only achievement in the four schools I attended, was to have been beaten more often and more thoroughly than any of my fellow pupils, simply because I firmly, if painfully, refused to conform to the norm, and in my day, conformity was the rule. If you broke that rule, you were beaten. Like a carpet. ‘We shall make you, or break you,’ they cried. Well they never succeeded in breaking me, but they did make me even more determined to oppose what I considered to be injustice.
On leaving Miss Maxwell’s ‘Academy’, I followed Michael to ‘Aldro’, a boarding school in Eastbourne. I was about seven and a half and not at all happy at the idea of being so far from home. There was a kind old master there called Mr Craft, who closely resembled Rudyard Kipling; well, he seemed old, but as I received Christmas cards from him for twenty years afterwards, he was probably only about thirty-five at the time. To me he represented kindness. Mr Hill, the Headmaster, on the other hand represented unkindnes
s, for I was often to be caned by him. ‘Go and change into gym shorts and wait for me in the gymnasium,’ he would order. That wait was more terrible than the thrashing. Even at seven and a half, I could take the beating, but the waiting made me sick with apprehension.
At Aldro, I received several beatings for several misdemeanours but the final straw came when I broke a lavatory chain.
The school lavatories were (presumably to discourage the young from taking themselves in hand) without partitions, and set out in a nice friendly line. Having just seen the latest Tarzan film, I thought I would try to emulate my hero by performing his swinging-from-vine-to-vine trick.
Grasping firmly the flushing chain of lav number one and letting out a mighty ‘Ah-oo-ah-oo-ah-oo aaah!!’ I swung successfully to the chain of lav number two, then on to chain number three, which unfortunately, in mid-swing, broke, dropping ‘Tarzan’ neatly into the bowl, one leg in and the other leg out. There I was forced to remain, ‘man trapped’, until assistance was called and ‘Tarzan’ was freed.
This was altogether too much for Mr Hill.
‘Monstrous behaviour! An incorrigible young man!’ he said.
I was beaten again for good measure and – after a phone call to my father – expelled.
Between schools, I had a salutory respite, and it was during this that A. A. Milne, a mucker of my father’s, invited us to his house in the country to tea.
There we met his son, Christopher Robin Milne, who was dressed from head to foot in a suit of shining and glittering armour. Whether this was because he expected to fall victim to violent assault from my brothers and me, or to withstand onslaughts from neighbouring enemy hordes I really can’t say. Anyway, he must have looked at me through his visor and considered I was friendly, because he was good enough to introduce me to his toy animal friends, Piglet, Owl, Kanga, Kanga’s son Roo, and best of all, his teddy bear, Winnie the Pooh. He also, as a great concession, let me ride his donkey which lived in a field by the house. His name, of course, was Eeyore.