Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  We met Baron, the fashionable photographer, who specialized in royalty, ballet, theatre and opera, as well as being available to photograph the glitterati of the day. I think Christya must have contacted him to be photographed, but I am sure I never paid him anything. We were invited to one or two of his lavish parties, but not to those where apparently refined orgies took place. He was a small, rather sinister, wizened man, and I always had the impression that he was involved in some murky business, perhaps blackmail. He seemed to know everyone’s secrets and had ample opportunity to reveal them publicly. As I remember it, he either died suddenly and unexpectedly or was murdered. There was certainly some mystery about it all.

  I came to know Carl Foreman well, famous in particular for having made High Noon, the quintessential western. He was one of the many American exiles who had been chased out of Hollywood by Senator Joe McCarthy, and I soon knew many more who had had to leave Hollywood or New York. One of them was Sigmund Miller, who became a lifelong friend and died in 1998. He had been a radio writer, mainly of series like The Creaky Door, of thrillers and of some Hollywood films, but was now a film doctor, rewriting other people’s scripts and dialogues, usually anonymously. Sigi was a bon viveur without any money. He had a wife and two small boys in London, a wandering eye for other women, and at some point Christya had picked him up, probably at Les Ambassadeurs. An entrepreneurial maker of low-budget films, much in evidence in these American circles just then, was Hannah Weinstein. The new television industry was greedy for product, and she was making film series for television, both for British and American consumption: she was good at exploiting the talents of these new London Americans and finding cheap British actors for costume series such as Robin Hood. Although she was not overtly attractive and certainly not young, I found her sexy and intriguing: had the opportune moment occurred, I certainly would have taken advantage of it. There are some women that men of my kind cannot resist, whatever their scruples, because the invitation and the need is so blatantly obvious. She nearly employed Christya, but “nearly” was becoming my wife’s trademark. I realized in the end that she was really very frightened of putting anything other than her glamour to the test.

  She went for a few acting lessons, but had never had any real experience other than screen tests and the production of Ghosts. After a few classes she came back and refused to go again, saying that if the teacher knew what she was talking about she would be acting, not teaching. She was always busy plotting, not only for her own career, which she had by now almost decided to let go, but for mine, especially trying to get me back into my grandfather’s good books, making me write him a stream of letters. I saw him occasionally, but he never invited us to Ardargie, which was just as well, because my uptight grandmother would hardly have been welcoming.

  New Year’s Eve 1949–50 is worth recording because I gave my first London party that night, in my flat in Lowndes Street. A French lady who worked for a family on the floor above helped with the arrangements, including a large bowl of French onion soup with which to end the party at four o’clock and mitigate the impact of the hangovers. I had invited my new London friends and had costumes for Charles Wrey Gardiner, editor of Poetry Review and author of autobiographical novels considered very daring, to appear as the Old Year (a Father Time costume) and Howard Sargeant, another poetry editor, who was to wear a diaper as the New Year. Among the guests were Muriel Spark and her boyfriend Derek Stanford. Muriel in those days was thirty-one, dowdy and overweight with frowsy red hair – a recognized poet, but living in considerable squalor with Derek, also bedraggled-looking and considerably older. Derek was a literary man-of-all-work reviewer, translator, anthologist and poet. He was to be cruelly caricatured later in Muriel’s novel A Far Cry from Kensington. I cannot remember who else was there. New Year’s Day was supposed to be the beginning of the Age of Aquarius and, as an Aquarian myself, I took an interest, even though I would see little of an age which, according to the astrologers, would continue for hundreds of years.

  I had several meetings with my Uncle Jim, who out of the blue offered me a job with his timber company – and I took it, because I needed the money. In the first week of January 1950, I presented myself at Surrey Docks in Rotherhithe, a long ride by underground and a ten minute walk down Plough Way to the timber yard of Calders Ltd, a few hundred yards from the docks themselves. I was put first into the softwood department and within a short time realized that there was a civil war between the two yard managers. One was an affable but solidly Tory head of softwood timbers, the material used either for building work or for railway sleepers. The other manager was a very pushy red-headed East End Jew called James Vogel, who was the current wonder-boy of the firm, bringing in big profits with what was the firm’s new undertaking, imported hardwoods to be sold to the furniture trade. Brierley, the softwood manager, gave me various jobs around the yard. I spent a day with the man who ran the kilns that dried the sleepers before creosoting. “Waht (sic) do you like to do, Jack?” he asked (I had concealed my last name, which was that of the firm, and John automatically became Jack in that working-class environment).

  “I like to write,” I answered unguardedly.

  “All right,” he said. “Here’s a pencil and here’s a notepad. Now write down these numbers as I call them out.” I spent the day recording steam levels and temperatures and getting nastily damp in the hot steamy kilns while doing so. I should mention that it was a very cold January, either snowing or raining most of the time, and I was mostly out of doors, which was preferable to the wet heat of the kilns.

  At lunch time I usually went to the nearest pub, The Plough, with Brierley, where Pat, the fat publican, kept up a stream of banter and comment while sipping neat gin all day. When Wimbledon came round, the conversation was mainly about “gorgeous Gussie”, a tennis champion who wore particularly frilly tennis shorts, much played up by the tabloid press. Every round of drinks was greeted with “Cheers, Pat”, “Cheers, Jack”, “Cheers” to whoever was in the circle. Then back to more hours in the yard, cold and damp outside, cosy and warm in the office when I could get there. I tried to keep on good terms with both the softwood and hardwood sides, and was eventually, having learnt something of the first, shifted to hardwood. The activity here consisted mainly of turning imported African exotic woods imported as logs into boards, and as spring arrived I was learning the names and qualities of these woods. It was difficult to move across the lines of the civil war. When I was in one office I was treated as an enemy by the other, and as a possible spy wherever I went. Perhaps only Vogel knew who I was and why I was really there, and he went out of his way to be affable, inviting Christya and myself to dinner at home in his flat near Regent’s Park, where everything glittered with novelty. Christya, recognizing another upwardly mobile pusher from a similar background to her own, made it her business to get on with Jim Vogel and his wife Sheila. Vogel was a rough diamond, and Sheila definitely felt that she was a class above her husband, but she appreciated his success and drive. She took many opportunities to remind him of her superior background and previous boyfriends’ prominent cachets in the London Jewish world.

  Little by little I was moved to the hardwood side of the Rotherhithe yard, spending much more time outside, tallying wood off the arriving ships a few hundred yards away, or measuring the planks as they were sawn in the big bandmill.

  “You married, Jack?” the overweight elderly sawyer asked me. “Yes,” I responded. I never volunteered much information about myself.

  “Ever ’ave it orf on a Sunday aftahnoon with the blinds dahn?” he probed.

  “Perhaps.” In fact I seldom spent a Sunday afternoon doing anything else.

  “Mine’s got her ’ole orl worn aht,” he went on, and further indiscreet revelations followed.

  I would try to change onto a subject like politics. A surprising number of the men were working-class Tories: to be known as one might give a man an advantage if he cou
ld become part of the salaried staff instead of remaining an hourly-wage worker with no security. Overtime on weekends might often give the casual workers more money, but staff expected to be kept on the payroll whatever the situation might be. Labourers were then earning about a pound a day with overtime, but seldom took home more than £5, even with weekend work. Tax was of course heavy on everyone then: the reconstruction of Britain and the new social services had to be paid for.

  The local MP was Bob Mellish, a Labour warhorse who I was later to learn had his corrupt side, but he was well enough liked down there. The one thing I did not hide were my Labour sympathies. Brierley’s assistant was a Labour supporter, and we exchanged a smile every time Brierley would go on about how much better everything had been under the Tories before the war. The man who ran the kilns regularly went to meetings organized by the Workers Educational Association, and on two or three occasions I accompanied him to listen to unpaid lecturers educating those who wanted to know something about the world of learning. The WEA has long disappeared, but it was a splendid hangover from the nineteenth century, when many working men would spend their evenings trying to educate themselves. The Open University may perform a similar function today, but without the intimacy and comradeship that I felt existed at those WEA meetings. I do not believe that there was any objection to women sharing the classes, but I never saw any there.

  There was only one black man, a Jamaican, at the yard, and I felt sorry for him, although to my shame I never spoke to him. He was employed to paint the metal girders. No one ever spoke to him at all, but they all joked about him as if he had just come out of the jungle. He was bewildered when it snowed. “What’s this white rain,” he was quoted as saying. He must have been lonely and miserable like so many other black immigrants at that time.

  I also attended in the evenings – always on my own, because such things did not interest Christya – a number of poetry readings, mostly in South London. Dulwich was one such centre for poets, and on one occasion, when Stephen Spender was reading his work, Roy Campbell, a well-known South African poet and avowed fascist who had fought for Franco in Spain and later had a career there as a bull-fighter, climbed onto the platform, hit Spender hard with his fists and with many more blows pushed everyone else off the platform. He then launched into a tirade about “all you pansies” and began to read his own poems, ignoring the shouts and boos from the seventy or so sitting in the audience.

  I also went several times to the Black Horse public house in Rathbone Place in Soho, where poets such as John Heath-Stubbs, tweed-suited and nearly blind, would recite from memory. Dylan Thomas would often appear. Many volumes of poetry were lost in that pub when Thomas began to declaim! By the third pint he was well underway, and line after line, metre after metre, would roll out from his organ voice, extemporaneous verse that flowed endlessly and effortlessly out of his mouth, terminating all conversations. He could go on for hours, and to my ears it seemed like perfect and resonant poetry of great beauty. You strained to catch every word and think about it, but could not. It just came out of him, and the more he drank, the better it sounded. I also met and heard him at the Wheatsheaf and other pubs where poets met. Among others I remember were George Barker and David Gascoyne, but at every such gathering there were many poets and their admirers, and of course I was drinking like everyone else, so much of it is only a blur now.

  My admiration for Dylan Thomas in particular has never diminished from among the many poets I met in those days. I bought and read with love and envy his published work, and my appreciation of it has never changed. That was in 1950, and perhaps later as well, but within three years he would be dead. When, in 1953, I heard the BBC broadcast of Under Milk Wood, those evenings in the Black Horse came back vividly. I never met him anywhere other than in pubs, where only closing time could stop that voice.

  It was at this time that I first met T.S. Eliot. I forget who brought me to the Authors’ Club, just off Whitehall, but I was introduced to him there, and on three occasions had long chats with him, usually at tea time. He obviously appreciated my great admiration of his poetry, which I could quote by the yard, and he was willing to give me glimmers of information about a few passages that puzzled me, but I can no longer recall exactly what they were. On one occasion he invited me to lunch with him the following week, and I hastily cancelled some other appointment to accept. I told him that I was a poet myself, and he invited me to send some poetry to Faber, which I eventually did, as I shall relate later. Eliot was very kind. His interest in a young poet, at the time heavily influenced by him, was genuine I think, and he asked me many questions, advising me to do what he had done himself: to keep another occupation to ensure a reasonable living. The poetry will always come when it is ready, he said.

  As the winter of 1950 drew to an end, I was moved to the head office of Calders Ltd on Lower Regent Street. Eros House overlooked Piccadilly Circus from the south-western side of the street, and I was put to learn about the accounts under Bill Battson, the friendly and very competent company secretary, and his assistant Peggy. Here above all I practised mental arithmetic. I sat at a desk with big ledgers of around sixty lines to the page and added up the columns of pounds, shillings and pence. To make this dull task more interesting I would make little bets with myself as to the eventual result. Next to me sat Charlie Thompson, a stout Scotsman in his sixties who had been doing this kind of job for decades. The general office had a door into my uncle’s office. He frequently opened it and called to Charlie to come in to explain some shipping document or statistic, often compiled by me.

  I got on well with Battson, an intelligent and genial man who well understood the complicated politics of the firm and the personality battles and feuds between the directors. Three of them considered themselves to be gentlemen and the others not to be. The deputy-chairman was called Kirkup, a Northumbrian country landowner who hunted in the winter months: we had acquired his Newcastle timber firm and he had every expectation of succeeding my uncle, then eighty-two, in the near future. The financial director was called Billington, an outside accountant whose firm was responsible for the audit. He was blind and always accompanied by a young clerk from his firm; he understood nothing about the business, was always critical of the accounts and especially of Battson who compiled them, and he too saw himself as the next chairman. The third came from the same Scottish background as my uncle: his name was Gordon Hutchinson, and he was a mildly alcoholic, suave and red-faced individual, much under the influence of a man called Philip Rann. Hutchinson’s function was to take government officials, especially those from the nationalized industries with which we had extensive dealings, out to meals, which he was extremely good at doing. The roughest diamond on the board was called Ashley, who ran the profitable pole-and-sleeper yard at Boston on the Wash, the yard where my father had worked before the war. He revered my great-uncle, kept to himself in Lincolnshire and came to London only for board meetings, staying out of the rivalries and leaving it to Philip Rann to acquire the poles and sleepers from abroad that he dressed and creosoted. He was also responsible for a smaller timber yard that dealt in home-grown timber at Brandon in Suffolk, but he interfered very little with Jack Knight, its manager. William Ashley was from the provincial lower middle classes, self-educated, with no interests outside his own area of work and management, but with the shrewdness and ability to judge character that one finds in similar persons as described by Dickens and Balzac, and he lived a life of unvarying routine. He never drank more than half a pint of mild and bitter, was church-going and practical, having worked his way up through sustained effort and competence. He was to be my next mentor at work. And then there were the two tough directors, Rann and Vogel, who were in effect joint managing directors. There was one other non-working director, Harry Watson, who had been married to the daughter of another timber merchant, whose firm had been acquired after the war. Once called Grandidge in Birkenhead, it was now another Calder pole-and-sleeper y
ard. Harry Watson, a blunt Lancastrian, seemed to have come with the purchase.

  There were many branches of Calders Ltd, and little by little I was to learn about them all. They were situated at Bo’ness, Port Talbot, Rotherhithe, Boston, Birkenhead, Scunthorpe and Newcastle upon Tyne, all ports where the timber imports arrived, with a number of small yards inland which processed home-grown timbers for pit props, fencing, building and furniture, some attached administratively to a larger yard, some independent, such as Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands. I was cautiously wooed by Rann and Vogel, more by the latter, because the first saw me as a future threat, and Vogel badly needed an ally. My uncle had obviously intended me for rapid promotion if I showed myself worthy of it, but my heart was still in literature, and aside from my own poetry, I was now running a small publishing company with Eric Turrell, who worked partly from home and, once I had moved into my next address, partly from the basement room I rented underneath it.

  It was Philip Frere, the solicitor with whom Christya and I dined occasionally at his house in Mayfair, who found me the large and imposing flat at 2 Wilton Terrace on the north-west corner of Belgrave Square. His interest was in Christya, of course, but he had to tolerate my presence, and he was mildly amused by it. The flat ran across the first floor of two large houses which constituted a short block and had two large drawing rooms, separated by large gilded double doors, a large master bedroom looking onto the Terrace and Belgrave Square, another drawing room and a dressing room which I used as a study; there were also a large dining room and two smaller bedrooms, as well as a kitchen, two bathrooms and a considerable amount of hall space. There could not have been a greater contrast to where my grandfather suggested I should look, which was Barnet, on the extreme north of the city suburbs. When he came to visit me, however, he was impressed and said nothing, and my uncle also enjoyed going there. He had himself had a socially ambitious wife, my great-aunt Mildred, who enjoyed her title and had made him acquire a house in Park Lane in the Twenties, as well as a country house in Norfolk. In those pre-war days Ledlanet in Scotland was only used as a shooting lodge for the grouse season. So my uncle understood all about extravagant wives, and mine was flamboyant as well. As I mentioned before, Philip Frere had heavily invested in property all over London. At this point he was just retiring from Frere Cholmeley – his very well-known and established old firm, where he obviously did not get on with his staider partners – in order to run a small but obviously profitable practice from his Mayfair house, where a Hungarian partner, versed in international deals, also worked. That the whole set-up was in some ways shady was soon apparent, even to my untrained eye, but Frere, tall and handsome in his sixties, was a consummately smooth English gentleman, well-educated, well-read and with excellent taste in everything from food and wine to the decoration of his flat. He was a director of many public companies and chairman of the Guardian Assurance Company. His wife, now estranged, had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, mother of the then present king, George VI. He could get away with anything.