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Against the Wind
An Autobiography
Geoffrey Household
Traveller
WHEN in fiction I present my hero I try to define as soon as possible his economic background. For me, at least, a man fails to achieve complete reality until I know how he has earned his living. ‘What does it eat?’ is the first question that the interested observer of any animal must ask.
For understanding of the human animal to ask by what work it eats is, except to the epicure, more revealing. I suspect that in future generations, if indeed they take for granted their rights to food and employment, the answer may be unimportant; but, in my own, wars and their financial consequences have too often made the filling of the belly as well as the filling of the mind an uncertain and picaresque adventure.
I belong to the transitional order between the mild and herbivorous capitalist and that anxious carnivore, the clerk with a family. My great-grandfather had the talent for earning more than he spent. My grandfather bought with his considerable inheritance the estate of Bilney in Norfolk and doubtfully enjoyed the life of a country squire until he attempted, very reasonably, to recover on the stock exchange what he had lost in the disastrous agricultural years at the end of the eighteen-seventies. Thus the only result of this fly-by-night capital was to raise the Households from small East Anglian farmers into the professional class. My father became one of H.M. Inspectors of Schools and then Secretary of Education for Gloucestershire; my uncle, an infantry officer. For me, too, the most probable employer was the State, and I surmise that I might have done very well in the Consular Service provided I escaped severe censure in my early twenties for some spectacular orgy, harmless in itself but of quite unconsular proportions.
I was set firmly upon the conventional ladder. A preparatory school which I loved and a public school which I detested led on to Oxford; and a shallow facility for examinations enabled me to ease my father’s life by scholarships. I did not ease my own. I was always expected to keep up the academic proprieties outside the examination hall—an absurd demand when all I had really learned was to present the few facts I knew with taste, and surround them with the mystery of learning.
Yet some of my examiners were great men, not easily impressed by sleek writing, and it may have been that a genuine respect for scholarship shone through my pretences. I myself was never a scholar—using the word in its untranslatable, donnish sense—but I did at least know how to be one. That alone was enough to mark me as a possible initiate of the mysteries, and to this day my mind remains questioning rather than intellectual. I have too little patience with the firmly-instructed of the modem world.
But this is a mere introduction to my story; and indeed I do not know whether the random collision which knocked my nucleus into space was due to academic distinction or to my unperturbed ability to miss driven pheasants. Thereafter, instead of bearing my strains and stresses in a solid, I flew off upon the glittering path of instability.
In 1922 a good degree did not enable a man to choose among industrial or government posts. The soldiers, three or four years older than I but completing their interrupted education at the same time, very rightly had first pick. There was also a depression. If I had had any definite ambition, I suppose I might have put myself in the way of fulfilling it; but I had none—not even an impractical and romantic idea of what I wanted to do. I was eager only to have done with education.
My development was freakishly late. To me money was something which happened or did not, and could no more be influenced than the weather. The usefulness of friends, clubs and connections simply did not occur to me, nor could I have told a prospective employer a single sane reason why he should pay me a salary. Among my close friends, however, was Ivor Barry. What we had in common was, I think, an almost oriental dislike of any intellectual, athletic, political or social activities. We basked in that Nirvana which was Magdalen and were very content. That his courteous father was Managing Director of the Ottoman Bank I knew, but it meant nothing to me. I treated a power in the post-war world with as much nonchalance as if he had been the vicar of his village of Nettlebed.
They were his pheasants which I missed. I cannot imagine what he saw in me; he must have perceived my gaucherie and worldly innocence; but those qualities are often accompanied by integrity. Perhaps he hoped that time would wear away the one, and be powerless against the other.
In November 1922 Barry offered me £400 a year to go out to Bucharest and learn to be a banker. I accepted with joy and excitement, knowing nothing more of banks than that they were institutions upon which one drew a cheque hoping that it would be paid. I certainly did not appreciate that the object of a bank was to make money for its shareholders—for I can remember how that simple fact burst upon me months later with the all-clarifying light of a revelation. As nearly as I can recapture the formless image in my mind, I thought a bank was in the nature of a public utility and that my duties would approximate to—as I should now put it—those of a Third Secretary in the Commercial Attaché’s office.
The Ottoman Bank was a Franco-British consortium which had the dignified flavour of the City at its Victorian greatest, and of Second Empire Paris at its most enterprising. Between the western frontiers of the Balkans and the eastern of Persia it upheld the respectability of money among the rapacious traders of the Levant—a mission as eccentric and deserving as to raise the standard of cookery among cannibals; but it paid. The Greek, the Baghdad Jew, the Armenian and the Pasha, having made their money, did not greatly desire to entrust its safekeeping to each other.
Whenever the Ottoman Empire gave painful birth to a Balkan State or, after 1918, to Arab States, the Ottoman Bank threw off a subsidiary to act as financial nanny. These, if run from London rather than Paris, had at least one British manager. Interesting men they were, but about themselves uncommunicative. They had acquired their wisdom and their languages by hard experience. They were not always the type to decorate as well as manage the head offices in London.
Barry’s policy was to collect a few future general managers from the universities and then put them through the mill abroad. It did not work for him, nor for the allied Anglo-Austrian Bank which tried the same plan at the same time. The reason was eventually obvious. The local managers had not the slightest interest in turning their banks into business academies for young gentlemen, who soon drifted away. However golden the future, the boredom and frustration of the present were unbearable.
I crossed Europe by the Orient Express a few weeks before my twenty-second birthday. I had never before been abroad, and romanticism ran wild during those four days in the train. It had reality, for, though I did not know it, I was travelling in the fourth dimension and bound for the nineteenth century. I stepped off the express into a country where Society still lived exactly as in the pages of de Maupassant, where the peasant still dressed, thought and worked in that timeless stability which ended in England with the Industrial Revolution and was destroyed in Eastern Europe far more by elementary education, the cinema and the automobile than by communism.
The Bank of Roumania, that subsidiary of the great Ottoman to which I had been condemned, worked its clerks and managers from nine to twelve-thirty and three to six. Saturday was a half day—if that be a fair description of five hours followed by an exhausted lunch about half-past two. A long week-end was rare, for we did not close on Saturday if a national holiday fell on a Friday. The only hope was a Saint’s Day on Monday.
The manager had one brilliant apprentice on his hands already; he was not going to be bothered with the training of another. He buried me in the Correspondence Department as an extra clerk, and there for four years I remained. He had the excuse that in the Correspondence you learned more of banking than in any other department, which was possibly true; on the other hand you saw nothing whatever of accounts, of discount, of arbitrage or of stocks and shares; and you never, except by accident, met a customer. I learned to type with two fingers and the various ways in which money can be transferred from hither to yon and what a documentary credit was. I cannot think of anything else. My position was made clear from the start when I was refused a key to the managerial lavatory. For the staff of about a hundred there were two others. That they worked at all was due not to water but to our resplendently uniformed porter and his staff of office.
The English manager falls headlong into the class of de mortuis nil nisi bonum. But in spite of detesting me he was in his own house pleasant, generous and hospitable. The Roumanian Christian manager was of immense distinction and had a long, silky, grey beard which enabled him to talk to politicians on equal terms and would have graced any chamberlain at the courts of St Petersburg or Vienna. The Roumanian Jewish manager was the most important of all, since half the customers and nine-tenths of the staff were Jews. He was a cordial old pawnbroker in manner, appearance and thought, and if the bank ever made more than its hum-drum monthly profit I suspect that he was responsible.
Among the clerks and customers there must have been characters of fascinating richness, but they passed through my life ten years too early. I had been sent out with prohibitions ringing in my ears. I was not to be too familiar with the local staff. I was not to become involved with local merchants. And I was not to marry a Roumanian. That advice was sound in so far as a young man should be discouraged from marrying anyone at all in his early twenties, but unjust. Roumanian women were of astonishing loveliness and courage, with a true appreciation of the joys of food and drink. Their attitude to marital fidelity—from their husbands they expected none—was perhaps light-hearted, for the Greek Orthodox Church, though as proud and ancient as the Catholic, had a reasonable attitude to divorce. But they did not hurry to take advantage of it. Their merry lapses were more civilised than beauty’s solemn progress from marriage, by way of the psychiatrist’s consulting-room, to marriage.
For all there was to see of high finance, I might as well have been employed by any provincial bank in England. The Bank of Roumania was not the national bank, and the Franco-British capital behind it had little influence on the post-war policies of the country. I should not, of course, have known in my first year or two whether it did or not, but later on I do not think I could have wholly missed any major movement, however discreet. The fact is that the bank confined itself to the most conservative operations, feeling its way through the devastating inflation which was then a new phenomenon to the practical banker in Europe.
Bolder finance, when there was any, our London office undertook; and the General Manager was sued by his own bank—long after my time—for exceeding his powers in granting political overdrafts. He suffered from too swift a rise, if I read him rightly, and too vaulting an ambition to leave his mark upon the history of Eastern Europe; and I would not blame vanity any more than his devotion to a charming French wife and two pretty daughters. I liked him for his tentative flamboyance, for his determination to enjoy the luxuries of life and to learn how to enjoy them. It was a pity, and perhaps unmerited, that his name should be recorded only in the Law Reports.
That a bank clerk without any private income should be quite as accustomed to luxury as his General Manager was unnatural and due entirely to inflation. The Roumanian leu had fallen from 25 to 700 to the pound, and prices had not caught up. My four hundred a year, from which neither England nor Roumania collected any noticeable income tax, put me into the class of some gilded youth from P. G. Wodehouse. Before I left, my salary had gone up to seven hundred, and the exchange rate had gone down to 1,200 lei to the pound. I can never be so rich again. The standard of living which I then enjoyed only exists today in France, and those who can both afford it and appreciate it are few.
Had I come under the influence of some predicted pillar of Church or State—an unlikely event, since both at school and at Oxford I was too aimless to appreciate columnar virtues in my contemporaries—I might at least have taken Roumania gradually. As it was, I surrendered to a most vivacious influence. He had arrived in the Bank of Roumania a year before me on a similar but superior ticket. His full title was Confidential Secretary to the Management. Unlike myself, he was free of the secret files and the managerial privy. He had spent the four years of the war interned in Ruhleben, and had come out with a desire for living so passionate that Cambridge, London and now Bucharest trailed behind his ability to extract amusement from them.
It was he who met me on my arrival. By the end of the day he had made sure that I knew about half the foreign colony, that I was wild with excitement for the future flesh-pots and that I was not the least danger to him. His generosity of temperament, his tall, dark distinction were more fitted to some exiled Russian prince than to a formal British banker, and could have disconcerted a board of directors less cosmopolitan than ours. He wondered if I had been sent out as a possible replacement. It must have been a comfort to him to discover that my business age was about twelve and that—since he had to put up with me in working hours—my ideas of what constituted amusement were, though still tentative, his own.
He encouraged me to be a hedonist, for whom good taste should be the only moral standard. He was four years older than I in age and twenty in experience, a brilliant linguist with a brain magnificently equipped for art or letters or finance. I owe to him the beginnings of my social education—I was sadly lacking in any of the graces—and the immediate and lasting destruction of my public-school prejudice against speaking foreign languages well. I also owed to him a precocious worldly wisdom, for though he approved my self-indulgent explorations he was careful that I should know the motives of all concerned, from my own to those of a cabaret porter or a politician with a pretty wife.
Thus he was far from a corrupter of youth. I was too apt a pupil. And pleasure tended to be all for the body since there was none for the spirit. My work could have been done as well by any bright secondary school boy, and very seldom was there time for my favourite and most innocent recreation, which was—and is—to do nothing in particular in open country. Tennis and golf had little to offer, for I have never found any sort of fulfilment or relaxation in propelling a ball more accurately than my companion. Even the horse, which I might then have mastered, was no mount for one who dreamed that he was riding into the ground the very leopards of Dionysus.
For the equivalent of half a crown—about the price that a young bank clerk should pay for his lunch and dinner—I could do myself as well as any man in Europe. The best restaurants of Bucharest were all ambitious; two, Capşa and Cina, superbly succeeded. They had collected recipes from the three empires, then but four years in the grave, which surrounded Roumania and had refined them by French craftsmanship. Their explorations even pierced the unprofitable mist of Atlantic islands. Among the outlandish Russian and Turkish names, which lit the French of Capşa’s menu like dream cities in a sonnet of Baudelaire, appeared Irish stew. I remember it was the best I ever ate, while forgetting how in the world the three strange syllables were pronounced.
For a pound I could have dinner for two in a private room of gold and cream and crimson, somewhat shabby from war and German occupation, but preserving that luxurious air of late-Victorian discretion which more properly belonged to my father’s generation than to mine. In one of those musical-comedy rooms I first discovered that the French with which I had been tortured at school could actually be used as a method of communication between two human beings. Thereafter I was ready to investigate the possibilities of my even more r
udimentary German. Roumanian I never mastered till sixteen years later—a devastating proof of the futility of my life. I mixed only in society which spoke English or international French or somewhat Yiddish German. The bank gave me no opportunity to identify myself with the country.
Among those companions whom I entertained in a style to which they were more accustomed than I, there ought to have been one to speak nothing but Roumanian and to teach me at least the musical endearments. But I could not even handle my own amorality. Ever since schooldays I had always thought myself in love with some delicious child, treating her with comparative and poetical respect while pursuing at large the life of an anxious tom-cat. Not even in Bucharest was I able to combine my drawing-room and my back-street tastes.
I well remember, at the age of about seven, falling silently on my knees at a children’s fancy-dress party before a dainty Titania in a pink tou-tou. There is the key to what I was: impulsive, extremely sensitive to feminine beauty and over-fastidious. And in Roumania such a temperament was nothing but an expensive nuisance. I was too conventional—a mingling of chivalry with caution—to discover whether any of the provocative young society beauties shared my enthusiasms, too aesthetically minded not to bother with elegance at all, too hare-brained to pay discreetly the rent of some unattached Roumanian who might well have been as sensible as she was lovely. So in that half-world of cabarets and Russian refugees, where remained some slight illusion of seduction, I tended to pass from flower to flower; but at least flowers they were.
For one mercy to my youth I shall be ever grateful to Roumania. Had so eager a young fool been hurled into a life of hedonism where wine was neither the normal fashion of his friends nor within easy reach of his pocket, he might have taken to swilling dollops of gin and whisky with the abandon of a serious drinker. As it was, I adopted the habits of the country and released the civilised European who lies, half a litre below the surface, in the average introverted Englishman; if, with the second half-litre and the brandies, I released a noisier European, his behaviour was generally more a matter for laughter than shame.
Against the Wind Page 1