‘I wonder if you’d care to tell me your side of the story. Very sorry about what happened. It must be terrible for you.’
It was not difficult to adopt the tone and syntax of a Job’s comforter. The woman was so desperate that she seemed reluctant to have me leave. ‘What do you want me to tell you? He’s gone, Derek, and never said a word to anyone.’ More embarrassed than ruthless, I hardly knew what I did want to know.
‘Um, your little boy,’ I said, ‘what’s his name and how old is he exactly?’
‘Little girl.’
‘Of course.’
‘Jennifer. Two. Three in October.’ She told me how crowded her parents’ flat was for all of them, including the baby, and how her husband didn’t always get on with her mother.
I was touched and disappointed: nothing she was telling me, of domestic and financial strains, was likely to warrant buttressing my expenses. I lacked the heartlessness to ask whether her husband had another woman or enough money to stay in France. I said that perhaps he would be back soon. ‘Do you think?’ She sat, elbows on the table, chin on the heels of her hands. Our Readers might be shocked by the husband who took his child to The Continent, but by the next weekend, the bloodless kidnap would no longer be news. Forty years later, it furnished an episode in my novel and TV series After the War.
Clement Attlee’s Labour government was reaching the end of its lease. In February 1950, his thin voice called for a general election. Brocky and I took the train to Plymouth to attend a rally to be addressed by Winston Churchill on behalf of his son. When recruited to Parliament in 1943, during a wartime by-election, Randolph had had a walkover. Now that the inter-party truce was over, the war hero and cuckold, whose wife, Pamela, had had a notoriously public affair with the millionaire American Averell Harriman, was opposed by Michael Foot, who had been editor of Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard when he was twenty-eight.
Unlike Randolph, Foot had no prestigious war record, but he had been born in the constituency. He was rejected from the army on medical grounds. Foot had, however, been one of the cross-party troika (with Frank Owen and Peter Howard) who – under the pseudonym ‘Cato’ – composed the bestselling 1940 pamphlet Guilty Men. Published by Victor Gollancz, it pilloried selected appeasers, almost all Tories, who were accused of selling the pass and leaving Britain too weak to confront Hitler in good time. The troika’s nom de plume was oddly chosen: in ancient Rome, both the famous Catos were bywords for intransigent conservatism. Quentin Hogg, the MP for Oxford University, who had been among Neville Chamberlain’s more durable friends, responded with a polemic entitled The Left Was Never Right. Although it cited chapter and verse in exposing the unpatriotic delinquencies of pre-war Labour politicians and their opposition to rearmament, Hogg’s overheated book never achieved the classic status of Cato’s.
We arrived in Plymouth by the early train and were taken in hand by the local Tory apparat. A marquee big enough for a society wedding had been rigged to receive the press, who were present in large, soon bibulous, numbers. The word must have passed in Fleet Street that the hospitality would be worth the journey. Long, white-sheeted trestle tables were heaped with sandwiches and pies. More important for old, outstretched hands, cases of beer and spirits were stacked behind the buffet.
In mid-afternoon we heard that Churchill’s train was going to be a little late; and then that it was going to be later than that; and then very late indeed. Glasses were refilled, and refilled again. The first, and likeliest, version of the story was that the hold-up was due to a farmer having stalled his tractor on a level crossing. In trying to haul it free, some yokels had managed to tip the silly thing on its side. It seemed hardly the kind of story to garnish the front page, even of the Scottish edition. After glasses had again been freshened, someone suggested that there might be a sinister side to the accident. What if it had been part of a left-wing scheme to sabotage Winston’s campaign to get his son elected? Michael Foot’s chums on the left-wing Bevanite Tribune were the fancied suspects, but it would make a better story if it had something to do with the Communists: RED PLOT TO DERAIL WINNIE was the right line to spruce up the northern edition.
The great man did eventually arrive, but not before the stacks of beer, gin and brandy had been thoroughly broached. It was too late for his speech to be any use even for the London edition. I doubt whether Brocky and I stayed to hear it. It had no effect on the result: Randolph was defeated by Michael Foot, who retained the seat until he decamped to Ebbw Vale in order to take on the mantle of Aneurin Bevan, of whom he wrote a two-volume hagiography.
When the results of the general election were announced, Attlee’s majority was seen to have shrivelled but not vanished. Since honour still had some place in politics, it was possible that the Prime Minister would feel sufficiently rebuffed to be obliged to resign. During the interregnum, Brocky and I were able to walk up to 10 Downing Street, without being quizzed or frisked.
Attlee was standing, in his signature funereal rig, on the front doorstep, a polite huddle of attendant journalists and a few cameramen below him. His emaciated voice announced that he had yet to consult his colleagues and assess the results in full. The British reporters were inclined to respect the Prime Minister’s temporising. Then an American voice was heard to call out, ‘Make up your mind, Mr Attlee, you going or staying?’ Attlee was constrained to be decisive. ‘We shall carry on,’ he said, in a modest voice that was never going to inspire anyone to fight on the beaches. The outspoken impatience of his American inquisitor announced that the leading Western power was no longer Great Britain. It was rare to hear someone who was not in fee to the British habit of deference.
My colleagues had few illusions about the merits or morals of our betters, but they were never openly disrespectful; nor, in my hearing, foul-mouthed. Effing and blinding was not yet the journalistic habit. Perhaps John Gordon’s Calvinist editorship served to moderate his underlings’ vocabulary. The only modest ‘dirty’ joke I remember hearing in the newsroom came in the form of the innocent question ‘Where is the smallest airfield in the world?’ Ever the eager candidate, I was quick with the innocent answer: ‘Athens’. ‘No,’ said Bernard Harris, ‘under a Scotman’s kilt: just room for two hangers and a night-fighter.’ Somewhat akin to this was the phrase, said to be the sub-editors’ regimental motto: ‘Snip, snip and Bob’s your auntie!’
Expressmen were content to have bylines, discreetly imaginative, untaxed expenses and a word of praise from someone higher up the chain of command. The penultimate accolade was a congratulatory word from The Country; the ultimate was to be summoned to the Beaver’s presence. The clearest intimation of favour on such an occasion was for the newsman to be asked what kind of a car he drove. It was prudent to name a modest motor, after which, one was licensed to hope, the Old Man would say, ‘Someone in your position, Mr X, ought to be driving a Wolseley.’ Mythology promised that one executive took modesty to a hopeful extreme by responding that he didn’t actually run a car at all. ‘Very wise,’ said the Beaver, ‘nasty, expensive things, automobiles, and they’re always going wrong. So … keep up the good work, Mr Y, keep up the good work.’
At the weekend, the skeletal staff of the Sunday Express was swollen by the influx of ‘Saturday men’: jobbing journalists who worked for the daily press during the week and came in to fatten our news and sports pages. I became friendly with a Daily Telegraph reporter called Ray Foxall. He had a neat brown moustache and swift shorthand. Since he lived in Putney, we took the Tube home together after the paper had been put to bed. It was a sumptuous privilege to sit with a copy of the next day’s paper and open it wide before the other passengers’ civilian eyes.
One evening when I went to dine with Guy and Celia Ramsey in Well Road, I found them in anxious mood. The new editor of the Daily Mail, pressed to economise by Vere Harmsworth, had decided to dispense with Guy’s services. The previous one, Frank Owen, had been a good journalist but a laggard leader: it was said of him, ‘The editor’s indecision is f
inal.’ Guy had been confident that something else would come along soon, but it did not. The following Saturday night, as Ray Foxall and I changed trains at Earl’s Court, he told me that the Daily Telegraph was taking on new staff. The following morning, before I went to play tennis with Jack and Margaret Piesse and Max Stewart, I called Guy and repeated what Ray had told me. The Ramseys always stayed in bed till noon on Sunday, reading Lord Astor’s Observer and Lord Kemsley’s Sunday Times, but my interruption was not unwelcome. A week later, the Telegraph hired Guy as a feature writer and deputy drama critic. He was also to fill in as deputy chief reviewer on the literary pages. In the latter capacity, he must have been one of the last people ever to use the word ‘limn’ in the popular press. I had to go and look it up. Later, the Telegraph bridge correspondent died and Guy was appointed in his stead. Thanks to Ray Foxall, I had been able to do Guy a good turn, at last.
IV
BEETLE AND I watched the 1950 election results as they were flashed on big screens in Trafalgar Square. I had considered myself a socialist ever since 1945, though my vision of socialism involved scarcely more than the abolition of privilege and racial discrimination. As a historian, Beetle had been an admirer of Peel and Palmerston, but she had no urgent contemporary opinions. Her beautiful four-years-older sister Joan was married to a Communist and appeared to go along with his convictions. Baron Moss had grown up in the East End. His father owned a cinema in the Mile End Road. He had witnessed Mosley’s marches and heard the chant of ‘We’ve gotta get rid of the Yids’. A neighbour’s twelve-year-old daughter had been thrown through a plate glass window by the Fascists. Such episodes, and the revelation that the British Union of Fascists was subsidised by Mussolini, have done little to impede the myth, propounded left and right, by Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, that Oswald Mosley was the ‘lost leader’ who might have restored Britain’s greatness.
Having been a Bevin Boy during the war, Baron became a layout man on the staff of the Daily Worker. He spent long hours in the office and was paid £6 a week. When we visited him and Joan in their narrow, semi-detached house in Wembley, I was impressed, if never convinced or converted, by his faith in the coming of the classless society exemplified by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Experience underground in the Nottinghamshire coal-field lent practical force to Baron’s beliefs. My ideas came only from books.
In the early 1940s, Guilty Men had convinced me that the Tories were the vessels of reaction and anti-Semitism. More recently, I had read The God That Failed, in which Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender and others announced their disillusionment with the party. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, primed by his naïve decision to join the Trotskyite POUM, had the merit of recounting specific personal disgust with the Communist Party’s murderous machinations in the Spanish Civil War. Although he claimed merely to have signed up with the first available outfit, Orwell seems to have had some instinct never to line up with the big battalions. Nevertheless, he assumed it to be right to be on the left, in whatever undefined niche.
Baron relied on Karl Marx’s long-distance clock, and Joe Stalin’s rewinding of it, to vindicate the party’s wriggling line. If Baron made me feel slightly ashamed to be working for the capitalist press, it was a proud moment when I was put on salary (‘But not a word to the NUJ, Fred’). My weekly small brown envelope contained £4.10s, fattened by the unround number of my expenses. The Beaver’s pennies enabled me to take Beetle to the cinema or to the gallery in the theatre. Terence Rattigan’s Adventure Story had a memorable coup de théâtre when Basil Sydney, as Alexander the Great’s friend ‘Black Cleitus’, came in from backstage, staggered forward almost to the footlights, and then fell on his face to reveal the seven-foot lance in his back, planted there by the drunken master who had saved his life at the Battle of the Granicus.
We also saw Laurence Olivier give a mannered performance in Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed; Paul Scofield playing twins (one of them Frédéric) in Ring Round the Moon, with the beautiful young Claire Bloom; Ralph Richardson as Cyrano de Bergerac (autumn leaves fell on the New Theatre stage). I imagined writing plays of similarly elaborate elegance as we had dinner after the show in old, chaste Soho. Goulash at the Hungarian Czardas cost three and sixpence. I dreaded the wine waiter. We drank water.
We first made nervous love, in my parents’ absence on holiday, on my narrow bed in the Balliol House back room, which looked out on the hazy view that had won me third prize in the Charterhouse painting competition. Unlike Hilary Phillips, Beetle seemed unfazed by the prospect of my going up to Cambridge. Since I could not imagine better, I assumed we were together for good. I never thought about marriage; nor, so it seemed, did she. Having grown up in a large Jewish family, she had none of my sense of woeful isolation. She was both clever and athletic: she had been in the gym team and almost beat me when we raced for a bus. As a St Paul’s first XI bowler, she once took five wickets for eight runs.
On bank holiday Monday, we sat on a slatted bench in the Large Mound stand at Lord’s to watch Middlesex play Sussex. Hoping, in vain, for Compton and Edrich to repeat their record exploits of the 1947 season, we rented fat, rectangular-buttoned plastic cushions for threepence. I never saw Denis make more than thirteen runs; nor did I suspect that he did not wear a cap because he was under contract to Brylcreem.
We did see Bill Edrich bowl his slinging zingers fast enough, despite his bad shoulder, to oblige Denis’s wicket-keeping big brother Leslie to stand well back, which he did not always do to the serviceable Laurie Gray. I was luckier and happier than I had ever imagined possible. Then came a small, but growing, summer cloud: in June, North Korea invaded the South. If there was full-scale war with the Communists, whose universal solidarity I never doubted, I was, I imagined, certain to be called up. I might never get to Cambridge. Ambition makes more cowards than conscience.
However British I was now pleased to be, America had a tenacious hold, especially the smart wit I associated with the New Yorker and the Algonquin Round Table. Beetle endured my descriptions of Thurber’s cartoons and the relish with which I recounted the tag in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty ‘What a dumb moll I picked!’ I was glad to discover that she felt the lure of America: she had considered going to the States to work. Never had I met anyone who embraced life so gladly and so fearlessly. She seemed even to enjoy being a solicitor’s secretary. We used to meet in the Strand for the one and tenpenny buffet lunch at Quality Inn. In the evening, I waited for her under the clock at Swan & Edgar’s in Piccadilly. As she came up to me, she was always smiling, head slightly on one side. Since she was a Paulina (as well as good to look at and a good dancer), she and my father were quite easy with each other. My mother, not yet forty, was no more than polite. Like Judith, the prima donna in Hay Fever, Irene was never wholly pleased if anyone else’s happiness distracted the attention from her.
Beetle’s mother was neither jealous nor critical. Rachel, whom her three daughters called Ray or Rooky, was the oldest of twelve siblings who had grown up in Brick Lane and whose surrogate mother she had been. Her parents had eloped from Odessa before the Great War. Her grandfather was said to have cursed the runaways and prayed that their progeny would die. Their first two children did indeed die, but their subsequent children lived, and many prospered. They spilled out of the East End into shops and businesses in less cramped parts of London. Happy to be English, they felt no call to be assimilated to the point of being indistinguishable. Most kept kosher; some married out, others did not. They were what they were.
Beetle’s father, Hyman Glatt, had come from Poland when he was fourteen, after working from the age of ten in a match factory. He was dark-eyed and handsome and, although shy, charming enough to attract a regular female clientele to his ladies’ clothing shop in Marylebone High Street. Ray subscribed to Vogue and kept herself, unpretentiously, if never inexpensively, in fashion. She was too busy and too sociable to worry about what Beetle and I might be doing when left alone on Saturday afternoons in 84 Mount
Pleasant Road. After we had made enough love for a while, we played cricket in the narrow garden and then there was Fuller’s walnut cake for tea. We often went to the movies at the cavernous Kilburn State Cinema. It sported a luminous cinema organ that rose stridently from the pit during the interval. After the movie, I took some alien bus to Hyde Park Corner and changed to the familiar 74, which took me to the top of Putney Hill. On one such trip, I left my yellow Everyman Nietzsche on the seat beside me, Zarathustra’s funambulist halfway across the void.
Fleet Street gave me exhilaratingly disillusioned access to what I took to be the real world; but I left the Sunday Express, after my nineteenth birthday in August of 1950, with small ambition to return to journalism. I resumed my study of the Classics, in accordance with Mr Howland’s explicit suggestions about darning the holes in my reading. The Korean War made no call on my services and little on my attention. The condition of ‘only childishness’ makes a man both old before his time and forever, in his own mind, too young for the demands of maturity.
In early October, I packed my old school trunk and sent it PLA (Passenger Luggage in Advance) to St John’s College, Cambridge. My father’s only advice was that I should not push myself forward; better to wait for others to ‘beat a path to my door’. A Jew was wise to leave it to ‘the Christians’ to bid him join their company. Cedric gave me £6 pocket money for the term and warned me not to run up bills. His income at Shell was just too great to warrant any financial supplement from the ‘state scholarship’ for which I had qualified, en passant, by my Cambridge success. He undertook to pay my buttery bill, but my allowance had to cover any books I wanted to buy. Doubtless he assumed that I should have access to excellent libraries, but perhaps it said something about the priorities of 1920s Oxford that he was more willing to furnish my larder than my mind.
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