Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  As austerity lost its hold on post-war Britain, Leslie Bricusse knew just the kind of things he wanted to have when success could procure them: three white telephones on his desk and a white convertible at the door. He personified charm without egotism, salesmanship without vanity. His spruce appearance recruited a cast of good-looking females, locally and in London, on whom he made no seigneurial demands. One of our imminent chorus was Julie Hamilton, the shapely blonde daughter of Jill Craigie, a prominent Pinewood screenwriter, the wife of Michael Foot MP. Leslie told me that ‘Michael’ used to make sure that his red tie was not on straight when he left for what he called ‘the boys’ club’, otherwise known as the House of Commons. All the world was a stage.

  During my third year, the ADC had a tributary influx of American graduate students, sponsored by beneficent foundations. Bob Gottlieb moved smartly into a directorial role by claiming to be an experienced exponent of the Method. Whether or not he ever attended Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, he had certainly acquired its jargon. His assumption of maturity was certified by his already being married. At Cambridge, Gottlieb and his then wife both wore spectacles of the same circular, horn-rimmed style. Joe Bain put it about that the reason that they were rarely seen in public together was that they shared one pair of eyes, affixed to the back of their sole pair of horn-rimmed glasses. When one Gottlieb was out and about, the other had to sit in the dark. Joe was, I am sure, motivated neither by anti-Semitic nor by anti-American malice; it amused him to compose flights of fancy. Gottlieb’s access to the ADC was eased by another American, Gordon Gould, who was already its president. Gordon too seemed older than his English colleagues, and certainly more mature. As an actor, he had a delivery slow enough to appear modishly Methodical. If he is the same Gordon Gould who appeared in Woody Allen’s Zelig, he was born in Chicago only a year before I was.

  I found myself in the cast for the summer Footlights revue, thanks largely to Leslie, but also to a sketch that I wrote satirising the weekly Free Speech television programme, in which Bob Boothby, W. J. Brown, A. J. P. Taylor and someone else (never a woman, often Michael Foot) discussed politics in a heated, yet mutually enhancing, manner. After supporting Churchill during the latter’s wilderness years, Boothby was dumped by Winston for alleged financial irregularities. As an Old Etonian Scottish MP, he became a maverick toff with a taste for louche company, such as that of the East End’s gangster twins the Kray Brothers and, on a pre-war occasion, Adolf Hitler. Never short of chutzpah, he had the nerve to respond to the latter’s greeting, ‘Heil Hitler!’ with ‘Heil Boothby!’

  Impersonating Michael Foot’s man-of-the-people braggadocio, I allowed the desire to get a laugh to trump my solemn conviction that socialism was indeed the medicine for all social maladies. On the first night, when I delivered my line ‘We in the Labour Party will do everything in our power [pause, frown] to get everything in its power’, I was amazed, if not shocked, by the volume of laughter, then applause, that greeted my on-the-nose crack. As we sat there, probably for no longer than ten seconds, the realisation broke, two years after Winston Churchill had been returned to Downing Street, that the resurgent bourgeoisie was now in a triumphant majority, at least in Cambridge.

  Cabbages and Kings was an unlikely success. Its solitary star was Peter Townsend, a short, very fair, large-nosed harlequin whose bloodless complexion needed no blanching. He played no part in anyone else’s sketches and said scarcely a word in his own; it involved only one prop, a brown paper parcel on which he somehow conferred a life of its own. If success gave him any pleasure, he scarcely showed it. He walked by himself. He got a First in English; had a brief, joyless excursion in show business; then vanished into J. Walter Thompson as a copywriter. He wanted to be a novelist, but never published a book; perhaps undue cultivation in Frank Leavis’s nursery had dried his sap. I saw him thirty years later when I gave a paper (Some Philosophers I Have Not Known) at a colloquium in London University. He still wore that bleak, boyish air of deferential superiority. He had had a brief marriage with the musical comedy star Elizabeth Seal.

  After the last night of Cabbages and Kings and before the cast disassembled, the outgoing committee was due to elect the ‘officers’ who would lead the club in the following academic year. Leslie proposed that I should be in charge of ‘press relations’, either because I had told him of my father’s role in Shell or because I knew Guy Ramsey. Leslie himself was a shoo-in to rise from secretary to the presidency. Since I was on his ‘ticket’, my selection was, he promised, a formality. Tony Becher went on back to college while I waited, literally in the wings, for Leslie to come out of the long meeting. He did so tight-lipped. Some people on the committee – Dermot Hoare and Peter Stephens and Kennedy Thom, the vice-president – were of the opinion that a Jew should never be an officer of the club. These three, a freckled Hibernian rugger player, a moustachioed clerk and a cadaverous apprentice divine, held the accursed shears over the thread on which my silly future depended. As outgoing president, Peter Firth did not have a vote nor did he interject any elder statesmanlike objection to my ostracism. Years later, after he had become head of religious broadcasting at the BBC, he sought to persuade me to do a radio ‘feature’ about the Wandering Jew. He went so far in his solicitations as to accompany me in my taxi to London Airport on my way to California. I did not feel the vocation.

  Standing in the wings of the Arts Theatre, I hope I laughed or at least shrugged. There was, I assumed, nothing further to be said or done. Leslie was not of that view; he was my friend and he would not allow the outgoing committee’s decision to stand. Peter Stephens had been elected secretary for the coming year, but Leslie, as the new president, intended to find a way to unseat him. Meanwhile, he had a few ideas about how I might ‘tickle up the book’ of Lady at the Wheel during the long vac. He could not, if he had planned it, have devised a better way of securing my loyalty.

  I stayed in Cambridge only for the few days needed to see the Tripos results framed on the Senate House railings. Both Tony Becher and I were given 2.2s in ‘prelims’ to Part Two. There was a very small number of candidates in that category; none had done any better. To no one’s surprise, including his own, John Sullivan was given a starred First in the second part of the Classical Tripos. Brian Moore, to whom I cannot remember saying goodbye, had got also a First in Classics, starless, I think. He became a long-serving schoolmaster in Bristol.

  Renford told me that the examiners had been amused by my essay on the relationship between religion and ethics. I had dared to say that the two things seemed as closely bonded as Brahms and Simon. The Brahms I had in mind was, of course, Caryl, who collaborated with S. J. ‘Skid’ Simon in writing Don’t Mr Disraeli and Bullet in the Ballet. I was surprised to discover that Richard Braithwaite, the chairman of the examiners, had even heard of such frivolous compositions. I liked to think of philosophy as a very solemn business.

  In the early summer, Hilary Phillips telephoned my mother. She was married and living in Hendon and had recently had a baby, with some difficulty. She would like to see me sometime, if I had nothing better to do. I called and arranged to go to tea. I took the Underground to Hendon Central and walked past a long parade of suburban shops and up to the side street of similar 1930s houses in which Hilary and Gerald lived. She was alone in the house. She had had a hard time with convalescence but she was still a very pretty woman. I told her that I was happily in love with someone else. She said, ‘Then why have you come to see me?’

  ‘Because you asked me to tea.’

  She said, ‘I’d better make some then, hadn’t I?’

  When she came back with the appropriate tray and, after a due delay, poured out the contents of the teapot, my cup was filled with hot water. Hilary laughed and threw her hands in the air and then lay back full length on the wide sofa. ‘I only forgot to put the tea in. What do you make of that?’ She lay there looking up at me. Frank Harris would have seized his opportunity to, as he said with enviable frequenc
y, ‘improve the occasion’. I lacked the desire or the recklessness. I took the teapot into the kitchen and she came and put some tea in it. I suppose I had gone to see her to prove how happy I was without her; and she without me, perhaps.

  I walked back past all those hedged and gated houses, distinguished from each other only by their gardens or their paintwork, and along the Hendon Way past the row of shops, a hairdresser, a laundry, a United Dairy and the paper shop with a two-sided billboard pitched on the pavement. By the time I was waiting for the train to take me back to civilisation, I was somewhat pregnant with my second novel, The Earsldon Way, although I had not yet written my first.

  X

  SINCE SHE WAS still working for Victor Gollancz, Beetle could take only a month’s holiday, during August. Nicolai Rubinstein, a great authority on medieval Tuscany, recommended the ancient walled city of Lucca. I knew of it only because Julius Caesar, Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus had met there, in 60 BC, to compose the three-headed tyranny later known as the First Triumvirate. We travelled third class by train from Paris to Pisa and by bus to Lucca. There we found a pensione where we could have two meals a day for the equivalent of eight shillings each. The only available room was on the top floor of an annexe run by two old ladies. They were unlikely to disturb us on account of the number of steps it would require them to climb. There was a big bed and a desk overlooking the mossed and lichened roofs of the old city.

  I had promised Leslie that I would come back to Cambridge with a revised script in which his songs could be heeled in time for us to begin rehearsals. I put more jokes and routines in the text, which Leslie had agreed that I should direct, while he concentrated on staging the musical numbers. I also wrote some sketches for the first Footlights Smoker of the new academic year. One was a two-handed send-up of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, in which they preened themselves on their command of the English literary scene and on the eagerness with which publishers pursued them (‘We were nearly subjected to rape / By the man from Jonathan Cape / ‘Victor Gollancz?’ / ‘No thanks!’ etcetera.) Tony Becher later supplied me with the perfect capper: ‘I’m the Greene to end all Greenes / And I’m the Waugh to end all Waughs!’

  Beetle and I took the bus to Viareggio and swam or lay on the busy beach. A man toting a wide basket trudged in the soft sand, calling out, ‘Bombolini, gelati, aranciata…’ Basted with sun oil, our bodies were badged with evidence of the mosquitoes that plagued our nights in shrill shoals. The white walls of our high room became covered with the bloody dottle of crushed insects. The generous food at the pensione compensated for our scratchy sleep. The cook was a squat, smiling woman who, when you thought you had seen it all, came out with a dish of cipolline glazed in the oven. A resident set of Italian army officers occupied a central round table. Their colonel was a stamp collector who asked us to send him any used covers we might have. There was, it seemed, a kind of innocence even in military men.

  We often spent a hot hour playing our soft version of cricket in a malodorous culvert under the thick city walls. Now and again, we bought the tissue-paper airmail edition of the Daily Telegraph. I saw one day that Peter May had scored an unsurprising century in his first Test match against the Australians. I watched him score centuries at Charterhouse in the course of almost all home matches on Big Ground. I met him only when I was drawn to play against him in the school tennis singles. He arrived on court punctually and explained that he had never played before. He would be glad if I would run through the rules. We knocked up for a short while and then he said we might as well play. He won 6–0, 6–0, without taking his first XI hasher off. He was so good at all sports that, while aged by his own precociousness, he displayed no vanity. The ex-Leicester and England bowler George Geary coached Peter until he was fifteen years old, after which he said that he had nothing left to teach him.

  In 1961, ill health accentuated by his lack of success against Richie Benaud’s Australians, forced May’s retirement from the England captaincy. My literary agent, George Greenfield, suggested that I ghost a book of his memoirs. He arranged a lunch at which I tried to discover what kind of secrets Peter might have in his locker. He had none whatever. He had had his problems, but he remembered no quarrels and had no dirt to dish. In an effort to show knowledge, I asked him how, when facing (and destroying) the legendary West Indian slow bowler Sonny Ramadhin, he could distinguish between a googly and an orthodox off-break. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘No one can.’

  ‘So how did you…?’

  Peter said, ‘The only thing to do is to hit the ball before it has time to turn one way or the other.’

  The memory of Charterhouse recalled the weekly ‘art lectures’ given, with black and white slides on the epidiascope, by A. L. ‘The Uncle’ Irvine, a recently retired, already legendary sixth-form master. The Uncle had inspired both Hugh Trevor-Roper and Peter Green to excel in Greek and Latin. Trevor-Roper acknowledged the quality of Irvine’s scholarship but considered that he had been coercive in imposing his views on ancient literature and life. Trevor-Roper absconded to history. Peter Green has displayed no difficulty in challenging or discarding idées reçues, whether from The Uncle or from anyone else. If Peter ever made a prosaic mistake, it was in diplomacy: at Cambridge, he gave abrasive notice of his heterodoxy before he had secured himself an academic pulpit. Simon Raven claimed that Peter’s first and great mistake was to have refused to apply for a commission in the RAF. This allowed his iconoclastic scholarship to be attributed to a bolshie character rather than to the freshness of his ideas.

  Simon was given a research fellowship at King’s, of which he was deprived after he breached the ethos of the college by a heterosexual adventure leading to the pregnancy of the nice Susan, who was later my patron at the Sunday Times. Peter, the outstanding scholar of his year, was suffered to teach undergraduates but never to become a member of the Trinity establishment. He found a rewarding world elsewhere, especially during the years he lived, wrote and taught in Greece. Unlike Trevor-Roper, Peter had dared to dissent from The Uncle’s opinions even as a schoolboy. When he won the Craven scholarship at Cambridge, The Uncle said, ‘I understood that you are to be congratulated. In which case, congratulations.’

  The Uncle had been a keen traveller in pre-war Italy. He summed up at the end of one sequence of art lectures by saying, ‘Of all the plaishes I have ever vishited the one I should mosht like to shee again is Shan Gimignano.’ Beetle and I went to the Lucca bus terminal to inquire whether there was a bus to such a place. Her Italian was better than mine but she left me to do the talking. There was a daily departure to the place I had named every morning at ten. We bought rolls and ham and cheese and a bottle of water and boarded the antique bus along with a few old peasants and their baskets. The driver headed inland, through Bagni di Lucca, past the ‘Ponte del Diavolo’, a pedestrian bridge steeply canted towards its off-centre crest and paved with cobbles untenable for cloven feet, and into the hills. We climbed through many bends in the narrow road until we stopped and the conductor called out ‘San Gemignano’. No one else got off.

  We were at the foot of a hillside olive grove at the entrance to a small village of not more than a dozen and a half houses. I willed myself to echo The Uncle’s rapture. Strings of corn husks hung, dark yellow, alongside wattled red peppers, from the tiled eaves; chickens ran and clucked as a cock strutted in to make his choice; grapes depended from wire trellises. It was a small Tuscan village. We walked down the rough street without seeing anyone at all. The low-built church had an unyielding door. We gazed at the olive trees and I wondered what The Uncle had treasured so keenly. Perhaps, more romantic than I had supposed, he had imagined the bucolic Virgil and Sabine Horace in the huddled cottages and the stone-walled allotments (Arnold Toynbee had recently claimed to have had a box seat at the Battle of Marathon). There was no café, no trattoria, no brava gente. The bus was not due to return until three o’clock in the afternoon. We sat in a field under an olive tree and ate our picnic.
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  I am not sure when it occurred to me that my mispronunciation – ‘San Gemignano’ for ‘San Gimignano’ – had carried us to the wrong place, but we discovered my error and, a few days later, took a smoother bus to the city renowned for its campanilismo. We could now see what The Uncle had admired, the competing towers conspicuous among them, and try to share his admiration. The baked beige streets seemed airless and without magic. Only Barna da Siena’s murals had a spice of enlivening irony. As I remarked solemnly in my notebook, his sequence of panels in the Collegiata seemed like an obituary of the dying Middle Ages. The characters of Jesus’s time were revised in the eye-narrowing light of suspicion and self-interest.

  In the panel depicting the crucifixion, the figure on the cross, being humanely speared by a mounted squaddie, attracted little reverence from the attendant crowd of frescoed extras. While, in a corner, grieving women huddled around Christ’s mother, Barna’s central image at the foot of the cross (destroyed by Allied gunfire) was of Roman soldiers throwing knucklebones for the Saviour’s raiment. Their scavenging presaged the vulturous advent of men such as the pitiless English condottiere Sir John Hawkwood, who came to pick up the pieces of what was left after the plague had done its worst. Barna included the only clear image of a grown-man’s penis that I have seen in ecclesiastical surroundings. The drunken Noah was displayed, without a loop of tactful drapery, while his manifest manhood is mocked – or envied? – by his sons. Campanilismo of a kind? Or was the artist suggesting that, when floods come, the likeliest survivors are those who know no shame?

  We sat on a beige stone wall and shared a small pot of chocolate-freckled ice cream and determined to find a way of not being separated when I went back up to Cambridge. For our fourth year, Tony Becher and I were free to live in ‘unlicensed digs’, without being irked by the rules of prompt homecoming at night and chastity thereafter. Tony found a furnished terrace house to rent in Montagu Road, well out of town along the Chesterton Road. There were four bedrooms, the largest of which, on the first floor, Beetle and I could share.