Going Up

by Frederic Raphael

  Not long after Beetle and I had returned from Sicily, Tony Becher called. He had met a woman whom he wanted to marry; her name was Anne and she had been a pupil of Helen Gardner’s at St Hilda’s. Might he come and introduce her to us? And by the way, did I know David Gore-Lloyd had died while we were away? I wrote to his parents, of course, and we exchanged Christmas cards for many years. After the publication of The Glittering Prizes, which I dedicated to David’s memory, Mrs Gore-Lloyd took offence. I never heard from her again. It may be that she was less upset by my requiem for David than by my depiction of his mother.

  The Earlsdon Way

  XVII

  LIKE THE VICAR of Oliver Goldsmith’s deserted village on his £40 a year, we were passing rich. A monthly cheque came to Chelsea Embankment, via MCA, from the Rank Organisation. Neither Olive Harding nor any Rank producer suggested a movie that Leslie and I should write; nor did they look to us to volunteer any ideas. It was an ideal arrangement. I worked at The Earlsdon Way every weekday morning; in the afternoon I went up to town to play bridge; sometimes in the two-shilling room at Crockford’s, more often at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, where I could read The Spectator and the New Statesman before continuing to work on my manuscript until it was time to go upstairs to the bridge room. The stakes were only sixpence a hundred, but the chances of winning were enhanced by the amateurishness of the players. Tea and a toasted teacake cost one and sixpence. It was a club rule not to tip the staff.

  The company was composed mostly of members of the Bar and the county or High Court bench. There was also a brace of magistrates, one called Pereira, who sometimes figured in the Evening News feature ‘The Courts Day by Day’. While Pereira carried traces of Sephardic caution, the beak known as ‘Master Humphrey’ was disposed to booming Anglo-Saxon candour. He announced one evening that he had had a frustrating day; the case before him had concerned two sets of blacks and, ‘of course, it was impossible to tell which were the bigger liars’.

  The most distinguished judge was Cyril Salmon, a scion of the Salmon and Gluckstein fraternity. One afternoon, while we waited for a four, he proposed a game of backgammon, at which my mother had been my tutor. At one point, Salmon threw an awkward pair of dice and said, ‘I shall have to open my legs!’ After the race riots of 1958, the first violent response to the influx of Caribbeans during the 1950s, several ‘Teddy boys’ were accused of inflicting grievous bodily harm on black people. Mr Justice Salmon presided over the trial. In due time, he delivered a four-hour summing up, without notes. He told the jury that, in a free society, men were free to think whatever they wish, however repugnant their opinions; if, however, they translated them into violent action they could expect severe punishment. When convicted, Salmon sentenced the guilty men to four years’ imprisonment. No similar outrages took place in England for several years.

  I asked Cyril whether he ever feared being attacked by people whom he had sent to prison. ‘Sans wig and robes, they rarely know who you are,’ he said. ‘One good reason for keeping the fancy dress.’ If the odd criminal did recognise the man who had sent him down, in the 1950s, home-grown felons adhered to social niceties: none expressed resentment. Perhaps they took their cue from the rarely vicious villains portrayed by Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers in Ealing comedies.

  Among those who came up to the O&C bridge room was the same Mr Murdoch who had enrolled me to make up a four at the Washington Irving Hotel in Granada. One day, Judge Sir Shirley Worthington-Evans told us that Murdoch had been charged with assaulting a black man on the train. He was acquitted, but then took to drink with even more application than previously. Not long afterwards, word came that he had been killed in an incident on the promenade at Eastbourne. Norman Richards QC, to whom I sometimes gave a lift in what he called my ‘barouche’, murmured conventional sentiments.

  Humphrey Tyldesley-Jones, a wartime colonel, now a commanding officer in the Territorial Army, offered a merciless obituary comment on ‘Master Murdoch’: ‘I don’t know which I disliked more – the sight or the smell of him.’ Tiddly’s smile was part of his unassuming civilian kit. I have no idea if he knew, or cared, that I was a Jew. He told me one day that, very late in the war, the RAF had bombed two ships that were at anchor in a Baltic bay. They were, in fact, prison ships with ‘Displaced Persons’ on board. After the ships sank, the SS shot any prisoners who managed to swim ashore. Soon afterwards, British commandos captured Schleswig-Holstein, where they found dozens of bodies washed up or left on the shore.

  The German Field Marshal Milch had surrendered to Tiddly (then an acting brigadier) in order to avoid capture by the Russians. Arrogant and bombastic, he insisted that the British and the Germans should have united to destroy the ‘Bolshevik savages’.

  ‘Savages? What about your concentration camps?’

  ‘For Slavs and such creatures,’ Milch said.

  ‘I want you to come for a walk with me.’ The Brigadier led the Field Marshal to the shore, where the bodies had been heaped by the tide.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Look closely,’ Tyldesley-Jones said. ‘Each of these men was murdered.’

  Milch sniffed and bent to inspect the bodies. Each had a bullet wound in the temple. After he had looked at three or four, he burst into tears and sat on the wet beach.

  My awareness of the horror that Tiddly encountered at first hand was entirely by proxy. Simon Raven claimed that his generation felt guilty because it had escaped the test of battle. I felt more indignation than guilt, although I did not yet have any idea of the scale of the indifference with which the Allies had regarded the extermination of Europe’s Jews. I was lucky to have spent the war on the right side of the Channel, but I was not grateful; I might be an Anglo-American Hebrew hybrid, but I was not a refugee; Chicago Semite maybe, but never Viennese.

  I had no conscious model when I was writing The Earlsdon Way, but the novel exemplified my cultural doubleness: presuming that suburban Tories were the sole repository of insular prejudices, I used the many-voiced method of Sinclair Lewis and John O’Hara (whose methods are more frequently imitated than acknowledged) to satirise the bourgeoisie, even as I solicited their applause and their pennies.

  The war was already subject to sentimental rehearsal in the cinema. When Leslie and I went to Pinewood in his new pink Citroën Metropolitan to have lunch with a producer, the panelled dining room was filled with actors on a lunch break from sinking the Bismarck or defending Tobruk. Officers (often Johnny Mills and Jack Hawkins) and men (such as Brian Forbes, Dickie Attenborough and Mickey Medwin) sat at different tables. Few stars played other ranks. Curd Jürgens played the regular, unsmiling German commander; but the name of the ice-eyed actor regularly employed to play a ruthless SS man has slipped memory’s net. Although I never knew it at the time, John Schlesinger was occasionally among his Jawohl-ing subordinates. Virginia McKenna was the loyal British wife for whom good soldiers and steady-as-you-go sailors yearned. The war had been a close-run thing; victory determined whose scripts would prevail.

  George Greenfield, who had won the MC at El Alamein and, as a literary agent, made a speciality of sporting and war memoirs, asked me whether I cared to ghost the memoirs of a secret agent who had been dropped into occupied Europe during the war. I arranged to meet Jacques Doneux in the front hall of the Oxford and Cambridge Club. Arriving early, I made myself as conspicuous as would be polite. No one who came in looked like a spy. Ten minutes after the fixed time, I sighed and glanced again around the crepuscular foyer. A bespectacled person seemed to have materialised, without ever making a noticeable entrance, next to the grandfather clock. I went over and said, ‘Are you by any chance Mister Doneux?’ He was. He had been there for some time, he said. Punctuality was something he had learned during the war; so too, it seemed, virtual invisibility: like Agatha Christie’s milkman in Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, he was as close to negligible as a man could well contrive.

  The artless manuscript of They Arrived by Moonlight explained why, unl
ike so many, Jacques survived without capture: he had obeyed the simple rules inculcated in him during training. Once in occupied Europe, he did not take public transport, except when it was unavoidable, never loitered at a rendezvous, did not spend money or time on women and drank nothing more intoxicating than communion wine (in private life, he was a Roman Catholic church-furnisher). At wise, irregular intervals, he moved himself and his wireless set to different addresses and was discreet in its use.

  After several quietly dangerous months in Brussels, it was decided in London that Doneux should return to England. He was given the address of a ‘safe house’ in Paris, where he could hole up before joining the escape route to the Pyrenees. He arrived in Paris on a glacial day and went to a flat, near Châtelet, where the concierge let him in. While he waited for money for a rail ticket to the next rendezvous, he stripped off his soiled clothes, washed them and hung them to dry while he took a chilly bath. He was roused from it by a telephone call. A voice told him that he must leave at once. The Gestapo was on its way. Jacques had to put on all his wet clothes and go out into the cold. He walked along the quai, past the Jardin des Plantes, to the Gare d’Austerlitz where he hoped to catch a train to Lyon. Short of money, he feared that his false name might now have been passed to the Germans. His manuscript continued: ‘I managed to get onto the platform and, when no one was looking, I slipped under the train and inserted myself on top of the metal struts and hung, face down, a foot or so from the permanent way.’ The next chapter began, ‘When I got off the train at Lyon…’

  In due time, Jacques and an RAF escapee passing down the same escape route reached the town of Pau, just short of the Pyrenees. The Germans and their dogs were on snarling patrol. The RAF man fell sick but, after a little while, ‘he pronounced himself as fit as a fiddle and as strong as an ox’. Jacques’s shoes were worn out. The only available new footgear was a pair of cotton and rope espadrilles. A passeur led Jacques and his companion to safety by taking such a steep path up into the mountains that the Germans did not bother to patrol it. When he reached the snow line, Jacques had to kick foot-holds in the ice with his cotton toes. By the time he had crossed into Spain, he had severe frostbite. The nuns in a convent took long care of him.

  Once able to travel on to Madrid, Jacques made his way to the British embassy. He hobbled into the presence of the ambassador, Lord Templewood, who looked at his visitor with no marked warmth. ‘I sometimes wonder’, he said, ‘whether you people aren’t more trouble than you’re worth.’ As a Chamberlainite appeaser, the quondam Sir Samuel Hoare had been despatched in eminent disgrace to Franco’s Spain by Winston Churchill. His Lordship did not, it seems, appreciate Iberian rustication.

  When my revisions of his text were approved for publication, Beetle and I were invited by Jacques and his wife to visit them in their house near Sevenoaks. All of the furniture had the odour of sanctity. The runner on our bedroom dresser was an altar cloth in reduced circumstances. Jacques had scarcely noticed how I had deleted his clichés and with what terse invention I had stocked his lacunae. One or two of his stories were not suffered to figure in the text, for ‘security reasons’. For instance, somewhat later in the war, a member of his réseau came to his colleagues and reported that he had been sitting in a café in Brussels when a man in plain clothes and a black hat sat adjacent to him and called him by his code name, Max. Max informed his friends that he had, of course, claimed not to know what the man in the black hat was talking about. The man then named all the other members of the network. The latter was, he said, a ranking official in the Gestapo; he could have them all arrested whenever he wanted. However, it was now clear that Germany could not win the war. He had to make his own arrangements to survive. If he was given 100,000 sovereigns, which he knew they had recently had parachuted to them, he would keep quiet. Max was to bring them the next day and had better come alone.

  The group decided that it had no choice but to pay up. Max took the money and set off for the rendezvous. He was never seen again. A recent Belgian TV series made use of a very similar plot. On the day of Jacques Doneux’s publication party, Beetle’s mother had a stroke and was taken into St Mary’s hospital. I was sure that he would understand but we had to be at her bedside. He took offence and, as he might have said, disappeared as silently as he had come.

  I saw on the Oxford and Cambridge Club noticeboard that a candidate with a Ghanaian name – similar to that of Johnny Quashie-Idun, who had been in the Footlights with us – had been turned down for membership, even though he was an Oxford graduate and a judge in his own country. The chairman of the election committee, Guy Coleridge, was a partner in Knight, Frank and Rutley. He had a lame leg, from a war injury. He had advised me that when I wanted to buy my wife a mink coat, I should tell him; it was much cheaper to get these things at auction, especially if one knew the auctioneer. When I told Guy that the evidence of a colour bar meant that I was going to have to resign from the club, he said, ‘Freddie, you don’t understand. It’s not a question of what colour the chap is, he’s just not the kind of judge we want in the club.’

  Alan Maclean was eager to have my second novel ‘in the works’ before Obbligato was published. When The Earlsdon Way was finished, he asked to see it immediately. Reluctant to let go of the literally only copy (taking carbon copies blighted spontaneity), I was flattered by his impatience and handed it over. A few days later, I left Beetle and went to have lunch with Leslie and some of his many showbiz friends at the Mayfair Club, in Berkeley Square. Fuelled with the sparkling hock that the generous Leslie always ordered (one of his guests described it, quietly, as ‘sparkling ad hoc’), I walked back to Chelsea Embankment to find Beetle looking grim. She had had a telephone call from Alan Maclean. I had better try to keep calm. He had left his briefcase, with my manuscript in it, in his unlocked office when he went out to lunch. On his return, it was gone. He was very sorry. Would Beetle ask me whether perhaps I didn’t have another copy somewhere possibly?

  He knew very well that I did not. I raged and I daresay I tried to weep. I threw a few things around. Beetle said soothing words and I was not soothed. We got in the car and drove along the Great West Road. It was palliative to be behind the wheel, the master of my silly fate. We got as far as Bath, had a six o’clock cup of tea, and then we drove back to Chelsea Embankment. When I next spoke to Alan, he offered £50 for me to rewrite the book. I scowled and sulked and rehearsed being dead for a day or two. Then I went and typed up the few handwritten chapters still in my notebook. Copying and improving them gave me the thrust to go on into the long section of which I had no trace whatever. I reproduced it pretty well word for word, even after taking care to put two carbons in the machine.

  When John Sullivan abandoned Oxford, and his first wife, to seek his academic fortune in America, he was prompt to acquire a new worldly vocabulary. One of his favourite transatlantic phrases was ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going’. I have never been tough, but I have always been determined to keep going. After six weeks of sour, laborious days, I was able to deliver the top copy of the rewritten version of The Earlsdon Way to Alan Maclean. Might it possibly be that his briefcase was abstracted by someone from MI5 who spent futile weeks trying to decode my enigmatic text?

  I took the second carbon copy of the rewritten novel to Manor Fields on the next evening when we went to see my parents. I imagined that my mother would feel at home with my recension of Sinclair Lewis. On our next visit, she handed the manuscript back to me and said, ‘You’ll do better.’ She must have taken the uncomely Lesley Keggin to be a portrait of herself. It cannot be denied that the problem that Mrs Keggin had with her shoulder duplicated one of Irene’s regular complaints; but in fact my grey and proper character was based on a nice Mrs Broke with whom I sometimes played bridge in the Crockford’s two-shilling room. Years later, I discovered her to be the not entirely conventional mother of Richard Broke, the script editor who was assigned to The Glittering Prizes. My father’s only pronounce
d reaction to The Earlsdon Way was to report that Dan Keggin, at Wimbledon Park gold club, was amused by my purloining his name for my hero.

  Alan Maclean took his time in reading the rewritten manuscript. Then his secretary rang to ask me to have lunch with him and his colleague ‘Auntie Marge’. I left Chelsea Embankment, in my second-best Adamson’s suit, brightened black shoes, St John’s College tie and with warranted misgivings. Simpson’s in the Strand was garrulous with suited businessmen having what was then habitually called ‘a spot of lunch’. Trolleyed joints of roast lamb and beef rolled among them as they inhaled the fumed mahogany atmosphere.

  After Alan had crossed the carver’s palm with silver, he told me that they admired much of the writing, but The Earlsdon Way was ‘not a Macmillan book’. Social realism, in which the local Conservative Party was held up to ridicule, was not the species of light-heartedness that Jack Squire had promised that I was good for. Auntie Marge hoped I didn’t mind them saying so, but I should never make any friends if I went on writing in this fashion. I told them that I had not become a writer to make friends, but to tell the truth, however much it might hurt people. I could imagine the shade of George Turner shaking his head: some people never learn.

  I stayed for profiteroles and then I went and phoned George Greenfield (careful not to press button A before someone answered). He had already spoken to David Farrer at Secker & Warburg, where his client Brian Glanville was an established author. When they came through, Secker’s readers’ reports were so enthusiastic that George could hardly understand why Farrer elected not to take the book. He sent it across Red Lion Square to Desmond Flower at Cassell’s, who soon offered a £100 advance. I had a new publisher.