Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! It’s the weight that matters. Put some stones in your rucksack tomorrow,’ he told me.

  I wanted to learn how to ski with knees and skis glued together, coming down the slope in a series of perfectly timed interlocking parallel turns, while dressed in the latest fashion – not to invade Austria. But I knew I had to obey him or there’d be an ugly scene the next day.

  That evening found me standing outside the hotel’s entrance, staring forlornly at the high banks of frozen snow stacked up beside the driveway and wondering how I was going to dig through all that to find stones. The doorman, who was in an impressive floor-length all-weather coat and cocked hat, asked me what I wanted. I told him. ‘For stones you must ask the hall porter,’ he advised me.

  Going back into the hotel lobby I hesitated, then approached the uniformed concierge standing behind his desk and explained my problem. The Swiss are impeccable hoteliers, it is their national métier. The hall porter showed not a flicker of surprise at my request. ‘Will bricks do?’ he asked me. By the time, a few hours later, when we’d finished dinner and I went upstairs to bed they’d been delivered to my room, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string.

  Our hotel was situated in the centre of the resort, standing among others like it close to the funicular where the principal ski runs terminated. It was an opulent, old-style place with ornamental plasterwork and high moulded ceilings. Apart from one couple – war profiteers, Father decided – we were the only English people staying there. Other guests were French or Swiss, plus a few he looked at hard, suspecting they were German. We didn’t get a chance to know any of them. One or two said good morning to us after we’d been there a few days but Father was deliberately rude to discourage them. ‘You have to snub them right away,’ he explained to me.

  He didn’t like the hotel, considering it too showy and grossly overheated. He made his feelings clear by ostentatiously removing his jacket when we had a drink in the bar. And he didn’t care for the look of the other guests at all, but to me they appeared enormously glamorous. I’d grown up surrounded by adults in utility clothes – usually the same ones, for they had to be bought with clothing coupons. But the people in the hotel had elegance and grace, the women wore high-heeled shoes and make-up, and an intoxicating trace of expensive perfume wafted on the air behind them as they passed by with their equally dressy partners, in the direction of the restaurant.

  The restaurant! It was a large, high-ceilinged, elegant room with tall windows which overlooked the mountains and which at night were covered by heavy drapes with swagged pelmets. It seated fifty or sixty people; the tables were set wide apart, the chairs were upholstered and comfortable. There was a dance floor, and a four-piece band played in the evenings after dinner.

  But the food! The food was a revelation to me, it was delicious. The thought certainly didn’t strike me at the time but it surely is quite odd that, instantly the war ended, in the newly liberated countries of France, Belgium and Italy restaurants were serving meals of pre-war excellence, while in Britain, co-victor in the struggle, people went on eating sausages, potatoes, boiled cabbage and a once-a-week egg for years afterward.

  In the hotel restaurant I quickly mastered the significance of the bewildering array of cutlery and forest of wineglasses set out on the white linen tablecloth in front of me. By the time I sat down with my parents for the New Year’s Eve gala dinner, I’d come to feel quite at home.

  My new-found poise took a major knock when I saw that everyone else there was in evening dress. We, of course, were not. Mother, who gave no thought to her clothes, wore a utility frock bought several years before in Fort William. Father had on his usual tweed jacket with poacher’s pockets large enough to accommodate a dead hare and a couple of trout. I was in my school suit.

  But we’d had a bottle of champagne already, and he ordered several bottles of wine during the meal, of which I got enough to relax a little in my embarrassment at how different we looked from the other guests. Father was born two drinks behind the rest of the world and it took a lot to raise his spirits; habitually of few words and those disapproving, with drink he thawed a little. On New Year’s Eve by the end of dinner he’d thawed quite a lot.

  With the meal ended, and coffee and liqueurs served throughout the dining room, the band had segued from a medley of American show tunes into romantic dance music – slow, smoochy and pre-war French. Father had been talking cheerfully to Mother and myself, even laughing. He was jolly – ‘full of beans’, as Nanny would have said – but the mood of this after-dinner music didn’t suit him, and my heart sank. He didn’t like smoochy music, or French music, or anything French except their wine. He didn’t want to listen to this sophisticated rubbish, he wanted something noisy, ethnic, real. Music of the mountains. His dissatisfaction become so expressive that, by the time he’d half risen impatiently from his seat to call over the waiter, several people at nearby tables were looking at us.

  ‘Tell the band I’ll buy them all a beer if they’ll play the “Tyrolean Yodelling Song”, he ordered the waiter.

  I knew it was a mistake, knew it. In dismay I watched the waiter move off across the restaurant. In the distance I saw him whispering to the bandleader. A little later he came back to say none of the band drank beer; they’d ordered three large brandies and a crème de menthe frappé. Unfortunately they didn’t know the number Father had requested.

  At the hotel in Father’s company time passed awkwardly, but I did learn to ski. Skiing lit a passion in me – I fell in love with the sport and stayed faithful to it throughout my life. That blue sky and glittering, all-white world … the brilliance of the light … the dry crisp air of the mountains … that exhilarating sense of flight swooping down the fall line with mind and body one and concentration total … Later in life it remained the one sure therapy to burn away the dross and restore me to myself.

  Teaching me to ski was a priceless gift – I can forgive Father everything for that.

  5

  Stowe

  Stowe was an eighteenth-century palace set in an exquisitely laid-out park containing lakes, woods and ruined temples buried beneath undergrowth uncleared for years owing to the lack of able-bodied gardeners during the war. The classical landscape had returned to wilderness.

  The school’s first headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, was still running the place when I went there two years after the war ended. A flamboyant classics scholar, he owned thirty-two suits and dressed impeccably in a different one every day, a fresh silk handkerchief blooming colourfully from the breast pocket. The rule that the teaching staff must all be unmarried had relaxed a little by the time I got there, but the faculty was still dominantly homosexual. ‘One man’s meat is another man’s passion,’ Dr Humphries, the divinity tutor, lugubriously informed us. ‘David and Jonathan …’

  A number of the boys there lived in Kenya, Nassau or Bermuda, and many of my fellow pupils had parents who were what Mother termed nouveaux riches and Father called ‘revolting spivs’. Well-dressed, sometimes rather raffish couples turned up at school on Sundays to whisk their sons off to lunch in shiny new Lagondas and Jaguar saloons – Jewboys’ Bentleys, Father called them. To my relief, my own parents visited seldom. When they did they came by train as we had no car. After Sunday morning chapel I walked three miles down the dead straight drive to meet them at the White Hart in Buckingham, and it was disheartening to do so with other boys flashing by in expensive motor cars, headed for the same destination. And it was embarrassing to lunch in the White Hart’s restaurant with parents dressed so differently from anyone else, a mother who spoke in such a piercing upper-crust accent, and a father who insisted on stowing his rucksack under the table and invariably had a violent row with the waiter.

  My contemporaries at Stowe were more sophisticated, travelled and experienced in the world than I. Their parents gave them an allowance and bought them good clothes, the latest skis, sometimes a horse. They appeared more fortunate than myself, and the
very lucky ones, I noticed, had not just one set of parents but two competing for their affection with the offer of holidays in St Moritz or Bermuda.

  I had no experience in mixing with my peer group, but during my time at the school I made two friends I would continue to see on and off for the rest of my life. Nigel Broackes was a tall blond boy with a grave manner and measured voice, the same age as myself. Our bond sprang from a shared fascination with explosives. His prep school had been requisitioned by the army during the war and the grounds were littered with detonators, ammunition and unexploded grenades. More enterprising than myself, he manufactured his own gunpowder and was looking for a source to supply him with hydrochloric and nitric acid so he could produce gun-cotton. I was wildly impressed to learn he’d set fire to his prep school’s gym.

  ‘What charges did you use?’ I asked, fascinated.

  ‘For that an incendiary bomb,’ he replied, and roared with laughter. He’d found it in the bushes and taken it to the gym to dismantle it when it ignited.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, enthralled.

  ‘Thirteen strokes on the bare bum with a steel-tipped dog whip.’

  ‘Better to be expelled,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he corrected me firmly. ‘Then they wouldn’t have accepted me at Stowe.’

  Another friend was Alex Howard, who intrigued me from the first because he dressed differently from anyone else. Slight, square-shouldered and stiffly upright, he sported a cravat in place of the usual tie and wore stylish lace-up ankle boots in tooled leather. ‘Finest Northumberland calf. Handmade,’ he told me proudly. He had an oddly explosive way of talking, staccato and emphatic.

  ‘Where can one get them?’ I asked.

  ‘Lobb. Can’t now. Made for my grandfather,’ he explained. They were the most beautiful shoes I’d ever come across but they were a little tight for him, you could see they pinched in the way he walked.

  While getting to know him I learned his mother was a novelist. She’d published several books, but the literary life she and Alex’s family lived in London didn’t sound remotely like Father’s or our own. ‘She throws parties. Sort of open house. Lots of interesting types, John Davenport, Dylan Thomas, Gerald Hamilton, who was the model for Mr Norris in Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Trains … You must come along sometime,’ he suggested.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I told him.

  Alex was promising. Mother had said to me, ‘You mustn’t accept any invitations, we’ll only have to ask them back,’ but I’d deal with that when I came to it, I thought.

  I had a home in London now, we used Arisaig only for summer holidays. Father was living in Milan but Mother had bought a house off The Boltons in South Kensington. An eight-bedroom, one-bathroom Victorian mansion with garden, it was an imposing house but in poor condition, for the building had been damaged when a bomb had fallen further down the street, and the masonry had been glued back in place with cheap mortar.

  It was here that Nigel came to tea one day, meeting Mother and my nine-year-old brother David over toast and margarine with Marmite. We’d been talking for a little while before Mother asked, ‘Don’t you find it lonely being an only child, Nigel? Don’t you wish you had brothers and sisters to play with?’

  ‘Not really, Mrs Scott,’ Nigel answered in the slow considered way he spoke even then. ‘You see, I will inherit a trust fund of £30,000 when I’m twenty-one, and if I had brothers and sisters I’d have to share it with them.’

  Later during those same school holidays I was asked by Alex to his home. We’d been to the cinema and afterwards walked there along the Fulham Road. Part of a terrace of what once had been workmen’s cottages, the house stood back from the street in a small untended garden.

  Margot, his mother, had long dark hair, a pale thirties face and a distracted manner; the living room where she sat knitting was untidy and cluttered. Alex had breezed in cheerfully to introduce me but I felt we weren’t really welcome. Perhaps it was a bad moment. Papers were scattered over the floor and the walls were scrawled with notes written with soft pencil in a large spiky hand. Alex gamely did his best to get a conversation started but there were awkward pauses. In one of them the ball of wool Margot was using rolled off her lap on to the floor. Reaching out a hand to the table beside her, she picked up a hypodermic syringe, leaned down to spear the ball and fished it back on to her lap to continue knitting.

  Soon afterwards Alex said we would move on. ‘Not one of her good days,’ he observed when we were in the street. But I was thrilled, I felt I’d penetrated Bohemia, and my impression of the exotic was enhanced by meeting Alex’s father a few days later. Formally dressed in blue suit, stiff collar and Guards’ Brigade tie, he radiated a smiling bland imperturbability. In fact I got the impression he actually enjoyed the chaos of his household. ‘What does your father do?’ I asked Alex.

  ‘Works for the War Office. Can’t say more,’ he explained succinctly.

  Was he a spy? I wondered, and couldn’t wait to be invited again to this tumbledown house where people led such emancipated lives and I might meet Dylan Thomas. It seemed to me a place of infinite possibility.

  Decadence was harder to come by during term. Classes took up the morning, evenings were filled by prep, and in the afternoons sport was compulsory.

  Father was disgusted by my loathing of all games. I’d made the mistake of telling him I thought competitive sport brought out the very worst in people, and he’d been so incensed I thought he was going to have a stroke. But the school contained an active anti-hearty movement and I was not alone in my views. Nigel disliked team sports as much as I did, but when we’d been there two years he was made captain of the house rugger team. I was shocked to read the announcement on the bulletin board and challenged him about it.

  ‘I detest rugger,’ he admitted. ‘But when I leave here I’m going to have to lead people – and that means to inspire and organise them. I despise games as much as you do, but one needs to learn how.’

  Instead of playing rugger or cricket, I ran. Living among so many people felt alien to me and I longed for privacy; running, I was alone. Each afternoon I jogged for miles through a classical landscape, across a Palladian bridge, down the Graecian valley overlooked by a temple standing in a grove of trees … all of it man-made, overgrown and ruined. When I returned to shower and change, the rest of the school would still be at games. Taking a book with me, I walked through the woods to where a small stream tumbled into one of the lakes. A mossy grotto had been built here overlooking the water and here I sat and read:

  Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

  About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green …

  I was addicted to poetry and Dylan Thomas’s words spoke directly into my open heart; I reached a strange exalted state as I murmured them, a sort of ecstasy. I could achieve the same mood at evensong: O Lord support us all day long of this troublous life until the shades lengthen and the evening comes, the busy world is hushed, the fever of life over and our work done …

  We attended chapel twice on Sunday, and evensong three times a week. Services were taken by two ordained ministers who were masters at the school. I was drawn to neither, put off by the mournful lechery of one and the jaunty worldliness of the other. Unlike Hurst Grange the thrust of the sermons was not spiritual but reflected the purpose of the school: to train a boy for dominance in whatever field, for power. Success meant wealth, position and authority. But by then I knew I didn’t like power or authority. I disliked being told what to do, and I loathed the obvious relish those with power derived from exercising it. I had no wish to push others around myself.

  And, though I dreamed of entering a more glamorous and amusing milieu, I had no desire for riches either. I wanted some stylish clothes and enough cash in my pocket to pay for drinks, but I didn’t want wealth. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God … The faith in which Mr Pope had ensnared me was e
xplicit on the point. And money was what my parents had been arguing about constantly for as long as I could remember; I’d determined never to talk about it myself or to let it affect me. But the sermons at Stowe struck a different note. Yes, the eye of the needle is a narrow gate but it was perfectly possible for a well-laden camel to get through it, the mournful minister assured us. It depended on the skill of the camel driver.

  I yearned to be grown up, to be a part of that scintillating world I’d read about and briefly glimpsed in Davos. Most specifically, aged fifteen, I longed to lose my virginity. The opportunity to do so was presented by a visit to Paris during the summer holidays. The place seemed absolutely appropriate, for what I knew about sex came from reading Henry Miller and his books about untrammelled life on the Left Bank.

  I was in Paris for only one night, a stopover on my way to the headwaters of the river Loire. Father had by now moved on to run the British Council in Belgrade, but even from that far away he continued to exert a baleful influence upon my life, devising adventure holidays it took all my ingenuity to avoid. This latest, which coincided with one of his brief visits to England, had proved inescapable.

  From some army-surplus depot he’d bought me an inflatable rubber boat. It was a dismaying present. Designed to carry the entire fourteen-man crew of a B52 Flying Fortress obliged to ditch in mid-Atlantic, even deflated the thing barely fitted into two gigantic rubberised sacks. Father’s plan was that I should haul the unwieldy mass of it to the source of the Loire, fill it with air, and sail down to the sea 400 miles away. He gave me £30, telling me not to return to England for a month.

  I needed someone with me, if only to carry the other rubberised sack. Nigel emphatically did not want to come, Alex was equally appalled by the idea. Brian Calvert was a late choice, I didn’t know him that well.

  The rubberised bags and our rucksacks meant each of us was carrying a load of about sixty pounds. Arriving at the Gare du Nord in the early evening, we had a fearful job getting the inflatable boat across Paris on the Métro during the rush hour. We checked into a cheap hotel on the Left Bank, us and the boat. The narrow street contained a seedy bar and a poky restaurant, the area had the authentic Henry Miller ambience, I thought. Over the set menu I told Calvert of my intention to lose my virginity after dinner.