Although Amy and my mother were barely, and rarely, civil to each other, Irene claimed that she was happy to have stayed in England. On the last occasion when she saw her 22-year-old kid cousin, Lieutenant Irvin Weintraub USAAF, before he and his glider crew and their GI passengers were massacred by the SS, after skilfully crash-landing at Arnhem, he said to her: ‘For a Kansas City girl, you sure have come a long way.’ Irene’s uncle, Max’s brother Fritz, died fighting for the Kaiser in the Great War.
My father blamed Winifred, who referred to him always as ‘Mr Cedric’, for the rift between Amy and his wife. In practice, it suited both women not to see or even to have to inquire about each other. Irene Rose Mauser had been a clever girl. Denied a college education by the bankruptcy of her father, Max, she went alone, in 1929, to work in Chicago when she was eighteen years old. Out of office hours, she kept company with the Second City’s West Side bohemians. One of them – Herman, was it, or Mitchell? – papered his living room, walls and ceiling, with silver paper. She had many followers but, I am pretty sure, no lovers. Buddy Cadison brought home an illicit, plain-wrappered copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses from Paris and allowed her to walk down State Street with it under her arm. During the war, he came, in uniform, with gifts from the PX, to see her at 12 Balliol House.
Irene was quick-witted, sharp-eyed and methodical enough to run a business. My father, who was almost eleven years older, preferred that she remain in the tidy flat. 12 Balliol House never needed as much daily help as Irene was given. Mrs Garrod’s thrice-weekly hoovering seemed to me, shut in my little bedroom at the end of the corridor, to moan for hours. Even in her thirties, my mother took an afternoon rest on her chaise longue, under a hand-knitted blue cover.
Now and again she went on the 14, 30 or 74 bus, with Adie Tutin, to Knightsbridge and a tour of Harrods. For a change, they would take the Underground to Kensington High Street and scan the merchandise at Derry & Toms or Barkers (‘Going up,’ the button-capped liftboys said, ‘going up!’), rarely Ponting’s, which had the low ceilings symptomatic of bargain basements. A congeries of overhead wires flew hermetic canisters of cash, with a pneumatic gasp, to a remote, inaccessible central till.
My mother had charge accounts, never a chequebook. Cedric gave her an allowance, but no access to his bank account. So far as I knew, in London she never set out to meet a man who was not her husband. In New York, she had had an admirer, a photographer called Vollmer, who took her picture with me in a sailor suit looking at a big book. Cedric had told her that he would divorce her if he ever caught her with another man. In hapless old age, sequestered in an olive-green hospital room, he told visitors that she had left him for a younger man.
During my teens, Irene’s most congenial daytime companion in Balliol House was a slim, grey-haired young woman from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Caroline Stewart lived directly below us and was literally on tap to come on up. She and Irene drank noon Scotch, with plenty of water, and plenty of Scotch. Caroline’s Southern voice was charmingly cracked. Her husband Max worked for Esso petroleum. On Sunday mornings, he and I played tennis on the garage roof against Jack and Margaret Piesse, who lived in the ground-floor flat below Mr Love. One box of Dunlop balls would last us at least a month. In the summer, my mother bought them, at three and six for six after they had been used, for nine games, at the Wimbledon tournament. When they got dirty, Jack Piesse shampooed them and ranged them on the radiator to grow fluffy again.
Margaret, a pretty young Yorkshire woman (he called her ‘Tyko’), had been Jack’s secretary when he returned from the war. After discovering himself to be Weybridge’s most decorated cuckold, he retrieved his self-esteem by becoming the husband of a good-looking younger woman. Margaret had an excellent forehand and a bouncy figure. Her fiancé, an RAF fighter pilot called Budge, had been killed soon after he went on active service in 1941. She and Jack had compatible reasons to settle for second best.
Once I had left Charterhouse, I was eager for exercise and suggested that Margaret and I play singles on a weekday afternoon. We did so only once. Jack embargoed any further encounters. In my innocence, I could not imagine why. On New Year’s Eve 1949, coming back to Balliol House from a dinner dance in the Manor Fields restaurant, Caroline Stewart, out on the grass in her nylon feet, silver high-heeled sandals in one hand, grabbed me to avoid falling over and kissed me, thoroughly, on the lips. I tasted the whisky on her tongue, and the heat, but I was too proper an inhabitant of Mr Love’s domain to take advantage of the opportunity; or even to see it as one, although Max was in the States on business and I had been reading Le Rouge et le Noir, in the red Penguin translation.
Like Stendhal’s Madame de Rênal, Caroline was approaching thirty. Max, she indicated, was no eager lover, but – despite those inviting silken feet – I was never any sort of stand-in for Julien Sorel. It was unthinkable to try anything with a married woman, especially when she was known to my parents. My long conviction was that ‘the Christians’ always behaved with propriety; it would require only some small infringement of their rules for a Jew to be revealed for what he really was and then to be pitched into the abyss.
One of my father’s Oxford friends was the Daily Mail journalist Guy Ramsey. He was married, en deuxièmes noces, as he was liable to put it, to the novelist Celia Dale. Her father James Dale was for many years Dr Dale in the morning radio serial Mrs Dale’s Diary. An Old Harrovian, Guy had stayed only one year at Oxford. He then repaired to Princeton, where he claimed to have taken physical exercise for the last time. Playing soccer for a college team, soon after his midday meal, he ran in at over-full speed and scored a brave goal, after which he threw up. His exploit was headlined in the college magazine: ‘FRESHMAN SHOOTS GOAL, THEN LUNCH’.
Guy had the manners, if neither the pedigree nor the means, of a literary grandee. When, after he had signed a cheque, a shopkeeper insisted that Guy prove his identity, the man was instructed to remember which side of the counter he was on. Guy’s claim to a fourteen-point Fleet Street byline was founded on his having scooped the story of where Rudolf Hess was held, incommunicado, after his 1941 solo flight to Scotland. Hess had hoped to please his Fuhrer by conducting negotiations, through the good offices of the 14th Duke of Hamilton, with a view to a German alliance with Great Britain against the USSR.
Such an arrangement might have appealed to more members of the upper class than patriotic histories care to recall. Bolsheviks and Jews (with small distinction between them) were anathema to members of The Right Book Club, to which my middle-of-the-road parents had subscribed when we first came to England. Taking ‘right’ to mean correct rather than Fascist, they were treated to books such as Alistair Reed’s Spanish Arena, in which Francisco Franco featured as a Christian gentleman. Among The Right Book Club’s selectors was Captain Archibald Ramsay. His anti-Semitism reached great, but never rare, heights of apocalyptic mania. My parents soon cancelled their subscription.
Shortly after landing, Hitler’s deputy was driven south and secreted in a rural hideaway in Norfolk. Prompt propaganda advantage was taken of what was said to be his panicky desertion of a losing cause that, at the time, displayed few symptoms of imminent defeat. No hint was published of Hess’s not unprecedented proposal for an Anglo-Saxon alliance. Hitler’s racism was not likely to be a deal-breaker. ‘Bendor’, the Duke of Westminster, was hardly alone in blaming the Jews for the outbreak of war.
Polyvalent exegetes, with an eye on top tables, have sought to exempt T. S. Eliot from anti-Semitism by making out that he showed untypical symptoms of it only as a result of some temporary aberration. In fact, his attitude chimed harmoniously with that of the High Churchmen among whom he was so eager a recruit, as well as with that of the President of Harvard, under whose aegis he had studied before the Great War. In the 1930s, the hierarchy of the Anglican Church had voted to exclude Jewish refugees from England. The Archbishop of York was alone in raising his hand, if never a loud voice, against the embargo. Anti-Semitism was a popular social
attitude until, supposedly, it was not; prejudice can be less a deep psychic trait than a smart button-hole.
After some bounty-hunting official tipped the Daily Mail the wink, Guy – who claimed to have local knowledge – was despatched to East Anglia to hound out the exact whereabouts of the fugitive Nazi bigshot. In truth, Guy had been to Norfolk only once before: as a young reporter, he was sent to cover a pre-war trial in which a rustic was accused of having carnal knowledge of a sheep. Returning in the LNER train, an old Fleet Street hand told the young Guy that he was disappointed by the crudeness of the case: he had hoped that the defence would take a romantic line and claim that the rustic had truly loved the woolly beast.
Having contacted the Daily Mail’s informant, no doubt with prompt cash in hand, Guy was given the address of the castle in which Hess had been secreted. He fattened whatever skimpy intelligence or gossip he could glean into a dramatic lead story that trumped the rest of Fleet Street. Hess’s sortie came early enough in the war to save his neck at the 1945 Nuremberg trial of the leading Nazis. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, even though he had been closer to Hitler than Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was condemned to death for planning aggressive war. Guy observed that Ribbentrop was more properly contemned to death: the one-time champagne salesman’s social climbing in pre-war London society (and the now embarrassing memory of how welcome he had been) denied him reprieve. I sensed a whiff of Ribbentrop in the anti-hero of Thomas Mann’s last, unfinished novel, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. The quality of the champagne that Krull peddles declines as the decoration of the bottles becomes more and more elaborately gilded.
Julius Streicher, editor of the Jew-baiting Der Stürmer, was also put to death in 1945. He was crude and loudmouthed, but his anti-Semitic sentiments closely resembled those of the nicely spoken Rothermeres, Londonderrys, Lord Redesdale, Lady Astor and who all else among Britain’s eminent appeasers. In his 1937 bestseller I Know These Dictators, G. Ward Price, Guy’s colleague on the Rothermeres’ Daily Mail, promised his readers that Hitler and Mussolini were more necessary than evil. It is routine for journalists to find agreeable things to say about those to whom they have privileged access. Dorothy Thompson was one of the few who, in the early 1930s, dared to portray Hitler, accurately, as an uncomely person of defective intelligence. She then made the clever, civilised mistake of supposing that this would impede his ascent.
Philo-Semitism did not inhibit Guy from observing that Hitler had succeeded in making the world Jew-conscious. As well as covering big stories (he was adept at empurpling his prose for royal occasions), Guy contributed brief book reviews to the Daily Mail. In the six- or eight-page 1940s newspapers, literature rarely commanded more than half a page. Reviewers were expected to cover four or five books in a few hundred words. Although literary journalism was poorly paid, pristine review copies could be sold, for tax-free cash, at a bookshop adjacent to the Cheddar Cheese, just off Fleet Street, for half their cover price.
If Guy liked books, he loved bridge. ‘The pasteboards’ were Celia’s only competitor for his attention. He played at Crockford’s, where the desk porter could cash cheques of up to £30 without asking questions. Guy wrote frequent, rarely paid-for articles in bridge magazines in which advocates of Acol and the Vienna Club illustrated the merits of their bidding systems with mutually accusatory instances from hands played in recent tournaments.
English post-war bridge circles were riven by the partisans of Terence Reese and of M. Harrison-Gray. Gray’s colourful Country Life articles were longer, and more elegantly phrased, than Reese’s laconic, black and white offerings in the Evening Standard. The rivals clashed vociferously at meetings of the British Bridge League. So graceless were their exchanges that Guy said that he always favoured whichever of the parties had not spoken last.
Guy’s fondest affectation was to appropriate S. J. ‘Skid’ Simon’s linguistic shorthand: ‘Give tube’, for example, when soliciting a cigarette. Skid may have been inimitable, but Guy could no more resist imitating him than he could that ‘one last rubber’, although he knew that Celia would be tightlipped when he arrived late, yet again, for the supper she had cooked and which I was sometimes invited to share. Guy named their only son Simon.
Skid’s Semitic provenance – his unabridged surname was Skidelsky – had not barred him from representing Great Britain in the 1938 Bridge Olympiad. He distinguished himself in the match against Germany by his flair and sportsmanship. The aristocratic captain of the German team told ‘Skid’ that he wished that he could introduce him to Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer would surely then abandon his absurd Judaeophobia.
Simon died in 1949, aged forty-four. His influence on the bridge world persists both in legend and in his books. Design for Bidding and Why You Lose at Bridge are probably the clearest, certainly the wittiest, guides to commonsensical play. The latter volume ends with a chapter in which an archetypal quartet of bridge players – the Unlucky Expert, Mr Smug, Futile Willy and Mrs Guggenheim – is depicted in instructive combat. One meets their descendants at more tables than even their creator ever played at. In collaboration with the journalist and theatre critic Caryl Brahms, who long outlived him, Skid also wrote a series of brazenly facetious novels. The skittishness of No Bed for Bacon prefigured the movie Shakespeare in Love. In the couple’s best literary number, A Bullet in the Ballet, the victim was a leading dancer. A footnote, unmistakably Skid’s, was appended to his name: ‘Don’t feel too sorry for him; his Petrushka was lousy.’ Skid’s wife died, at the age of forty, a few months after him.
The Ramseys were kind enough to appear unsurprised by my ambition to be a writer. They lived in a small, ground-floor flat in Well Road, Hampstead, and had a roster of local friends with whom they held play-readings. Among the supporting cast (Guy and Celia were the Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne of NW3) was their doctor, whom I was startled to hear them call ‘Johnny’. My parents never called our Putney GP anything but Dr Millis. The star figures of the Ramseys’ coterie were E. Arnot Robertson, the film critic, and Marghanita Laski, whose physiognomy gave her voice a singular warp. Arnot wrote several novels (including Ordinary Families), but is best remembered for her verses about a name-dropper that began, ‘As I said to Dickie Mountbatten…’
The scholarly and political renown of Marghanita’s family heightened her hauteur as a TV panellist on What’s My Line? She also composed segments for the Dictionary of National Biography. Her 1949 novel Little Boy Lost was one of the few that, at the time, alluded directly, if mutedly, to what was not yet called the Holocaust. She lived, with a husband who was never mentioned, in Capo di Monte, a grand house on the top of Windmill Hill. Celia referred to Marghanita and Arnot with complacent sorority. They were the three Fates of Hampstead artistic society.
Guy said of himself that he had a journalist’s skill for putting everything he knew in the shop window. Unlike my twelve-handicap father, the mature Guy took no exercise other than cutting and dealing the cards. He did, however, retail a golfing clerihew that I have never seen quoted elsewhere:
The Earl of Chatham, William Pitt,
Upon the eighteenth green fell, in an apoplectic fit;
And all around enjoyed the joke
As Fox murmured, ‘Beaten, by a stroke!’
While he rejoiced in familiarity with the bridge world’s top-class company, Guy was conscious that he never quite belonged in it. His book Aces All is a durable tribute to the great contemporary names – Reese, Harrison-Gray, Lederer, Kenneth Konstam, Jack Marx – against whom I came to play, as my patient father’s impatient partner, in duplicate competitions. Although he published only one work of fiction, a Fleet Street thriller entitled The Spike (on which the bitch-victim is found impaled), Guy relished the role of literary musketeer. Topcoat slung, with Gasconesque swagger, around his shoulders, he sported the lippy diction and plump pinkness of Robert Morley, the actor and author of Edward, My Son, who enjoyed wattled Shaftesbury Avenue fame in the 1940s and 1950s. Mist
aken for Mr Morley in West End restaurants, Guy was in no hurry to disclaim preferential treatment, even if it meant tipping the staff more than he could afford in order to sustain the grand illusion.
When Guy read my first jejune short stories, he was generous enough to deplore only gently the unsurprising surprises with which I chose to twist their tails. Celia was less diplomatic, especially when it came to clichés: ‘Cut, cut, cut’ was all her wise and trenchant advice. Mr Maugham had led me to think that familiar phrases made the reader feel at home: his characters found things as easy as falling off a log and were known to cut a long story short. In my lust to be eligible for print, I sent for a book of hints from the Evening Standard. One of them was to avoid static descriptions (for instance, ‘he had black hair’); better to blend them with the action (‘he ran his fingers through his black hair’). I ran corrective fingers through my stories, but they continued to be rejected by the evening papers and by Argosy. I was callow enough to read With the Editor’s Compliments as an expression of encouragement.
Dinners at 3 Well Road, when I had the Ramseys’ undivided attention, gave me a taste of the literary life never available in SW15. Guy’s aptitude for fanciful imposture led him to cast himself as Gustave Flaubert to my Guy de Maupassant. He would, he assured me, notify me when I had written my Boule de Suif and was ripe for publication. Guy rivalled Bartlett in the cosmopolitan repertoire of his quotations. When in north Africa for the Daily Mail, he had found himself, like other British journalists, denied access to General de Gaulle. He contrived to send de Gaulle a message, in his fine calligraphy, in which he refurbished Thomas Jefferson’s remark to Lafayette, ‘Chaque homme a deux pays, le sien et la France.’ Et voilà: the general’s door was opened to him. None of Guy’s stock of apophthegms was more liberating than Robert Walpole’s (as quoted by Boswell, quoting Johnson) ‘Let us talk bawdy, then all may join in.’
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