Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  I was not paid for the year this apprenticeship lasted, but lived on a small allowance given me by Father on the understanding I should not return to England until drafted. I lived frugally, eating bread and cheese in the cheapest rooms I could rent and reading in the evening. And I learned a little about wine.

  At the end of my apprenticeship Nigel Broackes joined me in Biarritz, bringing with him two girls we knew in London, Shirley and Charlotte. For him and myself this was our last celebration of freedom for the next two years: we’d received our draft papers and were due to join the army in less than a month.

  He’d left Stowe soon after I had while he was still sixteen, and gone to work in an underwriter’s office at Lloyd’s. ‘Much more useful than remaining at school, we both have commercial experience now. When we go for a job after the army it will prove invaluable,’ he said.

  Biarritz had been a popular resort earlier in the century and, though no longer fashionable, the little town had an easy, civilised feel to it. We took four rooms in a small hotel, lay on the beach and dipped into a cold sea; Nigel and I spent the evenings trying to seduce the girls. But at that time nice girls didn’t, and, frustratingly, Shirley and Charlotte were no exception to the rule. One evening Nigel suggested the two of us struck out alone and tried our luck at the casino.

  The casino was a splendid Edwardian building overlooking the sea in the centre of town, but because of our age we were not allowed into the salles privées but restricted to playing boule in the outer salon, an elegant room with a high, moulded ceiling. Standing in the crowd by the table we studied the game for a while before Nigel said, ‘It’s unfairly weighted because of the double zero, but I suggest we follow the same method as the greyhound syndicate I set up.’

  That had involved a slide-rule which he did not have here, but we tried it anyway, using a joint capital of £10. The system involved waiting for a prolonged run on one of the colours, then starting to bet against it. It worked, though it was quite boring.

  But we scored at the table that night, trebling our capital in a couple of hours. Quitting while we were ahead, we had a drink on the crowded terrace. It was a fine night, a dance band was playing and we felt lucky and happy and grown-up. Why take a job if one could live like this, I thought.

  A couple of days later I said goodbye to the others and caught the train to Nice. Father had cabled to say I should meet him there, we would take a walk together and have a serious talk.

  Our walk would be from Nice to St Tropez. As with all his schemes, it was a poor idea. I don’t think he had ever been to the south of France, but he’d studied the ground on topographical maps and the close-together contour lines and rugged terrain reaching almost to the sea had appealed to him greatly.

  As instructed, I was waiting for him at Nice airport. In old corduroys, his usual jacket with poacher’s pockets, wearing his own mountaineering rucksack and carrying another for me, he was not hard to pick out among the rest. Making our way past other passengers in fashionable resortwear, we came out of the terminal. He’d been faux jovial when we met, but the sight of trim suburban villas scattered over the foothills of the Alps and the busy stream of traffic rushing past on the littoral put him into immediate bad humour. The wartime maps he was using gave no indication of such development, this wasn’t what he’d been expecting at all.

  We set off at once, striking inland towards Grasse with the intention of walking parallel to the coast at an altitude of 1,000 or 1,500 feet. Father would not use roads and the route he chose involved scaling fences and making our way through private property and people’s gardens, sometimes under the startled gaze of the owners sunbathing around their swimming pool. ‘No such thing as trespass provided you don’t cause damage or chase sheep,’ he announced. I knew it was the law in Scotland; whether it was the same under the Code Napoleon, I doubted.

  At night, Father cooked our basic rations on a Primus stove. We slept, each wrapped in a single blanket, beneath a tree. After three days we were forced down to the coast and tramped along the shoreline, scrambling over rocky headlands and traipsing across private beaches set up with matelas and parasols … two hot figures in rucksacks marching in line ahead, one cross Englishman followed by his sullen son.

  In time we reached St Tropez. The little port was not then a popular resort. Its name meant nothing to Father but for me had thrilling associations with Guy de Maupassant and Colette. We stayed in a small hotel and next day took the bus to Nice. Seated side by side, the journey provided the opportunity for the serious talk I had been dreading. ‘Well, if you don’t like the wine trade what are you going to do?’ Father demanded. ‘Sheep-farm in Australia?’

  The outback wasn’t really what I had in mind. I saw myself in a faultlessly cut white suit and co-respondent shoes, frosted glass in hand, a yacht in the background. I didn’t mention my ambition, but I intended to become a professional gambler. In response to my increasingly desperate evasions, Father grew irascible. We were barely speaking by the time we reached the airport. His plane to Belgrade was leaving a couple of hours before my own. Just before his flight was called he said, ‘You’ll be on army pay from next week so I’m stopping your allowance.’

  Wearing his hanging-judge face, thoroughly exasperated, he handed me my ticket to London and £50 in cash. ‘That’s it,’ he told me, ‘From now on, you’re on your own. It’s your life. Personally, I don’t care what you do so long as you don’t become a male ballet dancer.’ It was the worst thing he could imagine, the ultimate pit of degradation and shame.

  Father’s plane took off. Three hours later I was in Monte Carlo. I’d retrieved my suitcase from the airport locker, dumped my rucksack, blanket and groundsheet in a trash bin, and caught the train there.

  From the Guide Michélin I’d chosen the four-star Metropole; I took a room with a balcony and view of the harbour. The rate was considerable but I was recklessly indifferent to cost. I had £10 of my own; with the money Father had given me, I was rich. And, thanks to Nigel, I had an infallible system at roulette and was about to win big, I could afford to be extravagant.

  After the privations of the forced march with Father, I revelled in the hotel’s opulent comfort. Unpacking my rumpled school suit of thick grey flannel, now slightly too small for me, I hung it in the steam of the shower to get rid of the worst creases, then took a long bath in the huge tub. I dressed with care, had one drink in the hotel bar to achieve the right mood, then strolled the 200 yards to the casino.

  While in St Tropez I’d soaked my passport in water, then smudged and altered the birthdate. I didn’t look twenty-one, but I gained entry without problem. In the rococo splendour of the belle époque interior I sniffed the mix of perfume and cigarette smoke and was spellbound with happiness. This was the setting of my new career and the ambience I was meant for.

  Making my way to the crowded roulette table I waited for three successive noires then began to play. I lost and doubled up, lost, and lost again. My luck was atrocious. In disbelief I watched my pile of 10-franc chips dwindle alarmingly. Doubling up, in mounting panic I continued betting. The stack shrank till it wasn’t a stack at all, just a few loose chips, then none. I felt ill, in less than fifteen minutes I had lost everything except the £5 in my shoe.

  Horrified, I stumbled from the casino, unable to credit what had happened.

  Back at the hotel, mocked by the ornate magnificence of the lobby, I rode the elevator and went directly to my room. I slumped at the Louis Quinze escritoire utterly dejected. I knew that I was ruined; I could not even settle the hotel bill.

  Stunned by misery, I stared at the folder in front of me. After several moments I realised it was the room-service menu … a wild notion leapt into my mind. I was aware of room service. It had existed at our hotel in Davos, where there had been a similar menu in my room, but I had never used it. The very idea of such convenience would have enraged Father. Now my heart was thumping with the audacity and sheer naughtiness of my intention as I planned the m
eal with exquisite care. Picking up the telephone, I ordered an elaborate dinner and a bottle of champagne.

  Twenty minutes later a loaded trolley was wheeled in soundlessly. The deferential waiter set up a table at the window with lots of silver cutlery and a satisfying show of crystal wineglasses. I took my place at table in perfect happiness.

  Night had fallen, a moon rode high in the warm dark. Below me the harbour was alive with yachts and light and the distant sound of music. Seated at the window, I enjoyed the finest and most expensive meal I had ever tasted. For the very first time my recently acquired knowledge of wine proved of practical use; the bottle of Roederer ’45 I’d ordered was superb.

  I ate slowly, savouring every mouthful, each meditative draught of wine. And, while I ate, I wrote a letter on the elaborately embossed hotel stationery describing the experience, the place, the view, the feast I was enjoying. I took my time. Sealing it in an envelope, I addressed it to Conscript J. G. Scott, c/o Hadrian’s Camp, Carlisle. I knew enough about army life to realise that by the time I received that letter I would be living in cold discomfort surrounded by adversity, but I thought that reading it and learning what a fine time I was experiencing at this particular moment would cheer me up. I’d signed off, wishing myself the very best in my new life.

  Abandoning my suitcase, clothes and possessions in the hotel room, I took with me only the last volume of Sartre’s Chemins de la Liberte, which I hadn’t finished. Royally drunk, I walked down to the lobby. I gave the hall porter my letter and watched him post it in the brass-bound mahogany mailbox for despatch next morning. No mention of the cost of the stamp – it would go on my bill.

  Leaving the hotel, I sauntered downhill 300 yards to the railway station and caught the train to Nice. In the airport I slept and hung around for nine hours, then took the next flight to England to join the army.

  7

  Suez Canal

  Hadrian’s Camp was a vast parade ground, a quarter-mile square, surrounded by a Third World village of tar-roofed wooden huts set in desolate open country whipped by a cold wind from the north Atlantic. It stood, or rather sprawled, outside Carlisle, a garrison town since Roman times.

  I lived in one of the wooden huts together with fifteen other conscripts under the control of a corporal a year older than ourselves, whose bed stood nearest to the smoky coal-burning stove. We slept with every window sealed. One of the few class differences in England persisting to this day, although diluted, is that the upper believe fresh air is good for you, the lower that it should be avoided at all cost.

  Reveille sounded at 5.30 am, while it was still dark. All the lights were switched on at once and the corporal began to shout. The muffled shapes in the twin rows of beds stirred into reluctant complaining life. A hand reached out from the malodorous lair of the man next to me, groping for a pack of cigarettes. He lit one with his cropped head still beneath the blankets and emerged blearily in a storm of coughing to greet the fug of dawn.

  All day we were drilled, marched, made to run, screamed at and abused. Confined to camp, we polished the nailheads in the wooden floor and swept the parade ground clear of snow with the three-inch brushes issued to apply blanco to our belts.

  The conscripts in my hut spoke in a wide variety of regional accents. I too had a distinctive accent. For some reason I had never modified the almost caricature voice I had inherited from my parents; it had never occurred to me that I could, any more than I could change the colour of my eyes.

  Class awareness and class resentment were very real in England in the early ’fifties. I expected problems, but astonishingly none arose. Shared adversity makes for a powerful bond, of course, but my fellow soldiers could not have been nicer. I hadn’t been taught class consciousness, it had never been discussed at home. Mother believed herself upper class in the same unthinking way she believed she had two legs, and Father, for all his faults, was not a snob. With the exception of the king, Winston Churchill and a handful of dead writers, soldiers and explorers, he disliked everybody equally; his prejudice was impartial.

  After four months’ basic training I was wrongly identified as a leader of men and sent south to Mons Officer Cadet School. I arrived among an intake of forty others in midwinter. Lined up on the square and shivering at attention, we were welcomed by Sergeant-Major Britain, 6’ 6” of ramrod spine, a furious red face with moustaches and a roar that carried for miles. Tired, cold, weighed down by equipment, we heard the list of planned atrocities they had in store for us. It concluded on a final note even more depressing than what had gone before. ‘… And furthermore,’ bellowed Sergeant-Major Britain, ‘From your pay will be deducted weekly a sum of two shillings and sixpence to pay for such little extra luxuries as lavatory paper and electric lightbulbs …’

  The hut I slept in had only eight beds. The one next to mine was Rodney’s. He’d come here straight from Eton and his accent was even more preposterous than my own. Eighteen is young to achieve pomposity, but then his family was rather grand. His mother had been a lady-in-waiting, his father held a job at Court. Rodney and I were seated on our beds polishing our equipment one day when he asked, ‘When you’re commissioned, what regiment are you going into?’ There were Good Regiments and Bad Regiments, he explained.

  ‘Which is better to be in?’ I asked.

  Rodney said a Good Regiment every time, explaining that he was going into the Royal Dragoons. He kindly offered to arrange for me to join him and I agreed, all things being equal.

  A few weeks later I received a letter from Rodney’s father, who was honorary colonel, summoning me to an interview. He wrote that there was a train from London at 10.05 which reached Swindon at 11.36. He would meet me at the station.

  He was awaiting me on the Down platform, a spindly, patrician figure in a tweed overcoat which reached his ankles – not at that period the height of fashion. He said, ‘There’s a train to London at 11.42. I’ll walk you over. What school did you go to?’

  I told him.

  ‘Oh.’ There was a wealth of expressiveness in the way he said it. I would discover later that all except two of the regiment’s officers had been to Eton.

  He grunted, cleared his throat, poked at a scrap of paper with his stick. Speech did not come easy as we crossed the footbridge to the Up platform.

  ‘Sport? Play games?’ he asked abruptly.

  ‘When I can,’ I lied enthusiastically.

  ‘Polo?’

  ‘Not actually, no.’

  ‘Hum. Find most of the other chaps do.’ We marched on a few paces. ‘Can’t really live on your pay, you know. Bad form to bring it up … but you’ve got money of your own?’

  ‘Well, Father …’ I began.

  We came down the steps from the bridge and stood together on the Up platform. ‘And what regiment was he in?’ he asked.

  He was a commando, I told him. Almost imperceptibly he winced; it was as though I’d confided that Father worked below stairs. I realised that going on to explain my ability with Sten guns etc. would be a mistake, this was not what the Colonel meant by ‘shooting’. But I had to say something. ‘But my Uncle Bobby was in the navy,’ I added.

  He wasn’t mollified, but at least I hadn’t said the air force. ‘What did he do in it?’

  ‘What does the First Lord do? I think he sort of ran it.’

  ‘Hum.’ A moment or two passed and then he said, ‘Yes, gamble, do you?’ His expression hadn’t changed but his manner had.

  I said I played a little poker.

  ‘Wild cards?’ he enquired with a flicker of interest.

  ‘Dealer’s choice,’ I told him.

  ‘Don’t care for them myself. Stick to stud and draw, I say, and you’ll be all right. Here’s your train.’

  In due course Rodney and I were commissioned. One spring morning in 1952 we marched on to the parade ground as cadets and off it as officers while Sergeant-Major Britain saluted us. A fine moment. We were given a month’s leave prior to joining the regiment in Egypt, b
ack pay, leave pay and uniform allowance, a total of £190. I was rich.

  With unusually good timing, Mother and Father were both out of England. Apart from Nanny and Mrs Reeves, the house in Gilston Road was empty. I moved in. It was an enchanted period, a time of grace. I rose late, read the Telegraph over a nourishing hot breakfast prepared by Nanny, then sauntered downstairs to discuss the luncheon menu with Mrs Reeves. A little later, over a cup of coffee in the living room, I’d arrange my ongoing social diary on the telephone, then set out the placements on the dining-room table for that day’s lunch party. For a month I entertained lavishly – Alex, Nigel, Shirley and Charlotte, and others I knew by now.

  For the first time in my life cash was no problem. The allowance of £120 to have my uniforms made seemed a gift, for I had a Turkish tailor who was confident he could run up the lot for £30. He’d done work for me before. He hadn’t made me any clothes exactly, but twice had adapted my one suit, nipping in the waist, narrowing the trousers to drainpipe width and adding a velvet collar to the jacket. Wearing the result on an earlier leave, I’d gone to a party and found renown.

  The party had been in a cobbled mews warmed by braziers and lit by fairy lanterns, thrown by a man everyone knew as the Bogus Baron. That night, renown appeared in the shape of a small overweight American slung with cameras. ‘Hey, I sure like that get-up,’ he said. ‘How about some photos of your wardrobe. Are you a Man About Town?’

  I said I certainly was.

  ‘That’s what the article’s called,’ he told me, ‘And I want it to be about you, ’cos you strike me as a very elegant and interesting person. I’ll come round to your house at twelve tomorrow. Where do you live?’

  Swiftly I gave him a false address. Men About Town do not live at Mummy’s and have a nanny.