In 1929, Cedric went, on an immigrant’s visa, to sell Shell gas in northern Illinois. He did so with career-enhancing success, although his Oxford accent was not an immediate plus among the area’s filling station managers, many of them Irish. Before catching the boat-train to Liverpool, Cedric had promised his parents, with implacable gratitude, that he would marry the first Jewish girl he met who had a good figure, a pretty face and no moustache. The nineteen-year-old Irene Rose Mauser, who was working as secretary to an architect in Chicago, qualified on all counts.
Though he never thought well of her dancing, Cedric was always proud of Irene’s smartness, in both transatlantic senses, and of her long-lasting good looks. They met, on a blind date, on a very cold Chicago Christmas Eve, at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. My mother promised that it was love at first sight. She did, however, discover – not long after they were married, in 1930 – that Cedric was still writing love letters to his old dancing partner, Phyllis Haylor. ‘Phyll’ had since turned professional and again won the World Dancing Championship, with a new partner. In old age, when Cedric was broken by ill health, she visited him several times in the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables. Phyll’s lover, the bisexual film critic and memoirist Nerina Marshall, was then living in Manor Fields. She became more friendly with my mother than my mother did with her.
When I was sixteen, my father sent me to the parquet-floored basement of a Knightsbridge Hotel, near Raphael Street, where Miss Haylor and Josephine Bradley and Charles Scrimshaw (a red carnation always in the button-hole of his black tailcoat) taught the waltz, the tango, the quickstep and the foxtrot, quite as if the 1920s had never come to an end. I soon despaired of winning pretty girls by the nimbleness of my chassis-reverse.
My father’s old friend Victor Silvester (whom Cedric called ‘Ginger’) and his ‘ballroom orchestra’ became middle-class household names in the 1940s and 1950s. His strict-tempo slogan – ‘slow, slow, quick, quick, slow’ – applied as much to the nation as to its ballroom dancers: England might be dancing to the music of time, but it was in no great hurry. My father had been invited to become Ginger’s manager when he first assembled his musicians, but he declined; perhaps because it was too risky, probably because the music business was no place for a gentleman. Despite his ‘investments’, a term he applied both to buying shares and to backing horses, Cedric never again had the opportunity to make any unusual money. He had to rely on his salary from Shell. Irene had an eye for bargains and managed always to be dressed fashionably. Since she never threw anything away, she was able, over the years, to retrieve and refurbish what had gone out of style as soon as its turn came round again. When she died, in 2010, at the age of 100, her wardrobe for all seasons included pairs of double-A I. Miller shoes that she had bought at Saks Fifth Avenue more than seventy years before, all in well-heeled condition.
Despite his steady devotion to Irene (or, when patiently displeased, ‘Reen’), Cedric told me, late in his life, that he did not think that it mattered very much whom one married. Was his indifference the result of being a Stoic, a world champion, a Jew or an English gentleman? He never alluded to his triumphs on the dance floor, but his posture to the world came, I suspect, of what it pleased him to keep to himself: once a champion always a champion, but one must never advertise the fact. Modesty was his only conceit.
Cedric could read Hebrew, but understood little. He made no attempt to teach me or to have me taught. He referred to Gentiles only as ‘the Christians’. Disdain and deference were on equal terms. In his hagiography of Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell suggested that, when young, Leonard Woolf, an Old Pauline, spoke of Gentiles as ‘goyim’. I doubt whether any well-educated English Jewish family of the time used that term. In his film The Hours, Stephen Daldry portrayed an exasperated Leonard Woolf shouting at Virginia, in broad daylight, on the platform of Richmond station. It is inconceivable that, in the period concerned, he would have raised his voice to his wife, in public, at any hour. The scene would have played better in a whisper anyway.
My father would have considered it outlandish to cleave to a kosher diet, but he did arrive home, now and again, with slices of bread-crumbed cold fried fish that could have come only from an East End delicatessen. He laughed, somewhat, at Jewish jokes, but he seldom told one and he never put on a supposedly Jewish accent. In New York, he had admired Jack Benny but deplored Eddie Cantor. In post-war London, he loved Bud Flanagan, suffered Vic Oliver, ignored Max Miller and liked Sid Field, whom we went to see in Piccadilly Hayride and in Harvey, in which he played a hallucinating drunk, unfortunately to the life.
The first Jewish story I ever heard, in New York, when I was five or six years old, was told by Seymour Wallace, one of the racier of my parents’ crowd. It concerned the inevitable Itzig, who, time and again, when his best friend had tickets for the Giants, told him, ‘Shelley, I’d love to come but I can’t; Levinsky’s playing.’ Finally, Sheldon asks Itzig does he really have to love music that much. ‘Music, shmusic!’ Itzig says. Sheldon says, ‘So how come it matters so much when Levinksy’s playing?’ ‘Vot he plays,’ Itzig says, ‘who cares? Vere he plays, who cares? But ven he plays…! I sleep vit his vife.’ Another overheard joke, of a similar low order, asked how you play strip poker in a nudist colony. The answer was ‘Mit de tweezers’. That was as near the gutter as I came. A later slightly naughty number must also, I think, predate our passage of the Atlantic: ‘The bee is such a busy soul / He has no time for birth control / And that is why today one sees / So very many sons-of-bees.’ The last line sounds uniquely American; in the 1940s, ‘son-of-a-bitch’ had no current British usage.
Happy to pass for a New Yorker in the 1930s, complete with seersucker suit and panama hat in the summer, Cedric looked no less at home as a conventional 1940s Londoner. In chalk-striped Adamson’s suit, white shirt with cuff-links and detachable collar, bowler hat, leather gloves and silk-sleeved umbrella, he waited each weekday morning at Putney Southern Railway station for the 9.08 to Waterloo. He was pleased to seem not to differ from other City-bound suburban gentlemen; that was the difference between them. They included our Somerville House neighbour Jack Piesse, who might nod at Cedric, but – from Monday to Friday – never said good morning. Yet Jack and his wife Margaret played after-dinner bridge with my parents every Saturday night, at alternating venues.
The handsome Jack was a solicitor for Esso Petroleum. He had had a brave war, from Alamein to Berlin, as a tank commander in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. In the week before Germany surrendered, a Wehrmacht soldier swung an unloaded rifle at his head in a dark cellar as Major Piesse was bent double, feeling with his dirk for trip-wires across the concrete steps. The German’s rifle butt crashed against the wall, just past where Jack’s head should have been. Jack riposted with an upward thrust of his dirk. It was the only time on the long way from Sicily to Berlin when he knew for certain that he had killed someone.
Jack, an Old Tonbridgian, drove a Mark 5 Jaguar and played golf at Royal Wimbledon, where the entry form for new members demanded ‘Name of father, if changed’. My Old Pauline father went by Underground to play at the adjacent Wimbledon Park golf club, which was not so inquisitive. It even admitted Variety actors such as Jeremy Hawk, Sid Field’s straight man in his famous golfing sketch (‘Address the ball’, ‘Dear Ball’, etc.). Hawk wore light-blue golfing attire and a light-blue cap, in which he dazzled female members. My father played regularly with a Jewish businessman called Alec Nathan who was a director of the pharmaceutical company Glaxo. He urged Cedric to buy its shares while they were cheap, but he failed to do so.
On summer days, when the sun shone, Jack Piesse would take his deckchair onto the lawn below the Manor Fields rose beds and render himself a darker shade of brown, an alien form of narcissism in those blanched, insular days. Stephen Potter’s 1952 manual of One-Upmanship peddled a put-down to apply to smug, bronzed persons: ‘Mediterranean type!’ If anyone approached him with neighbourly overtures, Jack closed his eyes. O
n winter evenings, he sometimes invited me to Somerville House to play the board game L’Attaque. He had an antique set from his childhood. The pieces wore uniforms from the Napoleonic wars, except for the spy, who had a cloak, a slouch hat and a two-faced Continental moustache.
Once aboard the 9.08, Jack and other commuters would open The Times, with its eight columns of personal advertisements encrypted in small print across the front page, or the Daily Telegraph, as a prophylactic screen against encroaching conversationalists. After their arrival at Waterloo, ‘the Drainpipe’ shuttled the City men, like reticent sardines, to the Bank. A Stock Exchange joke of the period told of a woman crossing Threadneedle Street and being all but sandwiched between two buses coming in opposite directions. All of her clothes were ripped off in the process and she passed out cold. As she lay naked in the street, a chivalrous broker stepped out and covered her private parts with his bowler hat. When the ambulance arrived, its crew looked carefully for signs of injury; then one said to the other, ‘Better get the man out first.’ In his diaries, Evelyn Waugh alludes to a certain Enid Raphael who, so he reported, once said, ‘I don’t know why they’re called “private parts”, mine aren’t private.’ I could wish, but cannot believe, that she was some kind of a relation of mine.
My father walked down Threadneedle Street to 5 St Mary Axe, where a wooden lift worked by a rope pulley in the hands of the punctual, waist-coated Len carried him up to his office. The letters, of three single-spaced paragraphs, that he posted to me when I was at school, first in Devon, then at Godalming, were dictated to his secretary and typed on paper as blanched and flimsy as £5 notes (so rare they often had to be signed before a shop would accept them). Cedric’s hieroglyphic signature was the only personal mark on the page. My mother wrote fluently in pen on blue headed stationery. She signed herself ‘Mummy’, during my childhood, or ‘Ma’, once I was married. Only in the 1980s, after overhearing my American-Armenian agent, Ron Mardigian, call his mother ‘Alice’, did I adopt the habit of calling my mother ‘Irene’. I never called my father by his first name.
Shell Oil had been founded by Marcus Samuel, the first Lord Bearsted. A posse of Jews figured in its original executive complement. My father joined the company just too late to be of their number. The company secretary was Alfred Engel, with whom Cedric had been at Oxford. Engel’s son George was an outstanding classicist at Charterhouse a generation before me. The sixth-form master, A. L. ‘The Uncle’ Irvine, a Mr Chips who said goodbye just before I could profit from his exacting tuition, dispensed young Engel, once he had won his Oxford scholarship, from the diurnal drudgery of composing Latin and Greek proses and verses. Instead, he encouraged his prodigy to become an expert on Corinthian black-figure vases. Since I would have nine months between leaving school and going up to Cambridge, my father, while shaving one morning, in sleeveless aertex vest, commodious underpants and silk socks stretched to transparency by American-style suspenders, advised me to emulate young George. Arcane expertise could cut a key to distinction. As he spoke sound sense, I noticed that my father had a thickened and opaque left big toenail. Some twenty-five years after the reminder that winning scholarships was not identical with being a scholar, I was asked to review George Cawkwell’s Philip of Macedon, an academic work of more diligence than wit. In it, George Engel was gratefully acknowledged as editor. There were some negligible flaws, which I did not neglect, and one passage of entirely scrambled print. Printers can do things, after proofs have been corrected, that even a punctilious editor has no chance to put right. Would I have cited Engel in my review had an antique splinter of envy not been lodged in my psyche? My less-than-pretty conduct is worth mentioning only because there must be thousands of such uncharted pettinesses in every life. Biography is not a science, but a branch of taxidermy. The autobiographer alone has the privilege of stuffing himself. I now have an opaque left big toenail.
During my years at Charterhouse, contact with the opposite sex was limited to epistolary exchanges with Hilary Phillips; mine more passionate (and purposeful) than hers. Her sister, Diana – who had an unfortunate eye – had gone to Oxford. Her parents were keen that Hilary should follow her. My licence to be alone, for an hour or more, with their daughter on the sitting room sofa in Portman Mansions, off the Marylebone Road, required me to improve Hilary’s ability to construe Livy’s provincial Latin prose. Her admission to Oxford depended on achieving that now obsolete competence. My path to a rewarding session of deep kisses passed through the Caudine Forks, in which, on Livy’s account, a Roman legion was trapped by their Samnite enemies and obliged to ignominious surrender; which Hilary never was. As Latinist and as lover, my darling was of the Fabian persuasion. Had I been able to shape her into Oxford material, my ardour might have been capped by her grateful subjugation. That achievement was beyond me and so, therefore, was her Non Licet Gate.
Hilary did concede that French kisses were ‘oddly satisfying’, but when I promised that there were things that were more satisfying still, she cited the creed that marriageable men did not want a slice from a cut cake. She greeted my Cambridge scholarship with dismayed congratulations. Quick to calculate that she would be at least twenty-one by the time I graduated, Hilary then added on the two years in which I could expect to be doing National Service. She would be twenty-three, and adjacent to senility, before she could hope to have that ring on her finger. With whatever regret, I had to be deleted from the roll of suitable suitors. I had a suspicion that there was already a candidate for Hilary’s favours, an off-stage Charles, of whom she spoke with teasing warmth.
My parents’ friends often asked me what I ‘wanted to do’. Cedric was keen that I qualify as a solicitor or an accountant, or both. Such people were rarely out of work. My uncle Lionel had been a barrister whose mots embellished the family anthology. Can he truly have been the first person to say in court, ‘I deny the allegation and defy the alligator’? On solitary walks through rainy London, I often sought shelter by climbing the many stone steps to the public gallery in the law courts. I listened with emulous appetite to the silky Mr Fox-Andrews making his pitch for damages after improperly loaded barrels had rolled off a brewer’s dray and done his client a thumping mischief. He displayed a neat wooden model on which he pointed out to his lordship how the barrels should have been ranged, and wedged, and how, in practice, they had been.
I could not understand why Mr Fox-Andrews spoke so slowly until I matched the spacing of his phrases with the movement of the judge’s fist across a stiff page of his red, leather-bound ledger. I presumed that I, like Cicero in most of his cases, should appear for the defence. Although it was an article of faith in the system of British justice that a jury’s verdict on the facts be deemed infallible (otherwise how should the death penalty remain unquestionable?), it appeared to have required advocates of rare resource to save any number of defendants from being wrongly convicted.
Since a first-class degree in Latin and Greek promised access to enviable eminences, I resolved to do my bit of Tacitus or Thucydides, Homer or Virgil, every day until October of the New Year, 1950, when I was due to go up to Cambridge. Meanwhile, how could I earn enough money to take some new girl to dinner in Soho and to a movie, preferably Italian or French, but not with Fernandel in it, at the Academy Cinema, or to the theatre (Jean Anouilh rather than Terence Rattigan)? As a result of his being put in charge of press relations for Shell, my father seemed well placed to help me find newspaper work. He treated influential City journalists, such as the Daily Express’s Fred Ellis and The Economist’s Rowland Bird, to informative lunches at the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly. Apprentices – such as the young William Rees-Mogg, later editor of The Times – qualified only for Le Perroquet in Leicester Square.
For all its convivial perks, Cedric’s post-war office was a comedown. In 1945, he had been invited to return to New York, to take up the bigger and better-paid job that he had renounced, for patriotic reasons, at the outbreak of war. To his superiors’ displeasure, he decl
ined to go back to Rockefeller Center. He told me that his decision was due to his wish not to rupture my ascent on the British academic cursus honorum. I did, however, remember him saying, when I was a small boy, ‘Never forget, you come third in this family.’ Perhaps it was fourth: Cedric’s mother Amy was a valetudinarian who contrived to move an inch nearer to death’s door whenever her wishes were not honoured. She was determined that her son not escape across the water for a second time.
My father was never again offered work worthy of his qualities. When I saw him sitting at our Macy’s dining room table, almost lipless with repressed fury, as he made itemised retorts, a), b) and c), to some chiding memo from a boss, Trevor Powell, who took pleasure in putting down someone cleverer than himself, I determined never to work in an office nor, if I could help it, to have a boss; better an unranked artist, preferably in Paris, than the second, or third, or umpteenth, businessman in London.
With Cedric on hand, the widowed Amelia Sophia excelled in coercive helplessness. For another dozen years my grandmother, attended by the sisters Winifred and Ada Stanley (pious subscribers to The Watchtower), played the supine tyrant in her eau de Cologne-scented flat, 12a Dorset House, overlooking Dorset Square. Whether her intermittent crises were due to heart attacks, as Winifred claimed, or to a surfeit of Maison Lyons violet chocolates, as Dr Cove-Smith hinted, Amy wanted Cedric (named after Little Lord Fauntleroy) to be on hand, whatever his American wife might wish. Ex-England and British Lions rugger captain Ronald Cove-Smith asked Amy, on one occasion, whether she had had a particular condition before. When she said she had, he said, ‘Well, you’ve got it again.’ Diagnosis and diplomacy went together at a guinea a visit.
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