by David Niven
‘All right…then you show me round,’ said the General.
‘Well,’ began Trubshawe like some obsequious house agent with a prospective client, ‘this is the anteroom and the dining room is up these steps to the right, the kitchen is below and the bedrooms, such as they are…’, he trailed off as the General looked at him speculatively for a long time, tapping his highly polished riding boot with his leather cosh.
‘Show me round the—barracks,’ said the General in a controlled voice, ‘that is, if it’s not too much trouble.’
‘Pray follow me, sir,’ said Trubshawe (the greasy head waiter routine now leading way to a bad table). ‘Come, Mr. Niven,’ he added over his shoulder as an afterthought.
The grisly little procession wound across the almost deserted barrack square; a few bedraggled and hung-over Jocks looked up apprehensively from whitewashing some stones around the guard room.
‘Fatigue party ‘shun’,’ yelled a corporal rising from behind a sporting paper. Unfortunately, his snappy salute was ruined by the fact that he omitted to take a cigarette out of his mouth.
‘Mr. Niven! take that corporal’s name,’ roared Trubshawe, military efficiency now and pulling the big switch.
‘Sir!’ I yelled back and rushed over to the offending man.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I hissed at him, ‘it’s a General doing a surprise inspection—get the word round quick—get everybody looking busy.’ I rejoined the group just in time to see the General pointing towards a squat building.
‘What’s that?’ he demanded.
Trubshawe and I had a somewhat sketchy idea of the layout of the Citadel but it still came as a rude shock when I realised that the Chief Raspberry Picker was shamelessly passing the buck to his trusted lieutenant. ‘Mr. Niven,’ he said sweetly, ‘what’s that?’
‘Er…the library, sir,’ I faltered hazarding a guess. Trubshawe must have misheard me, ‘The lavatory, sir,’ he said. We went inside what was quite evidently the band practice room. In the far corner was the pipe major, who hated going on leave, frantically beating life into the bag of his pipes while his trembling fingers groped for the first plaintive notes of ‘The Flowers of the Forest’. The General looked grim.
The inspection of the barracks proceeded on its nightmare course. Trubshawe heard my whispered cue of ‘latrines’, headed in the indicated direction, took one look at several pairs of protruding white spats belonging to Jocks who had decided to seek sanctuary there, lost his head and made the sort of noises reserved for orderly officers in the dining hall at mealtimes. ‘Any complaints?’ he asked.
Bewildered and aggrieved Scotsmen rose from their individual thrones.
‘No complaints, sorr,’ they mumbled.
We correctly identified the cookhouse only because Cook Sergeant Winters, in a white apron, was standing outside it beckoning with a heavy-handed helpfulness with a ladle, but we received some timely-reinforcements in the shape of Ginger Innes wearing the red sash of orderly sergeant and a smart-looking corporal from Trubshawe’s platoon. Our morale rose as, with their whispered help, we successfully fielded searching questions in the quartermaster’s stores, the miniature range and the domain of the Pioneer Sergeant.
By now the full complement of fifty caretakers had been mobilised by bush telegraph and wherever we went there were groups of men frantically cleaning, polishing, leaf sweeping and wheelbarrowing.
Trubshawe, as we headed for the General’s car, felt that victory was within his grasp. He, relaxed and was in an expansive mood when the General fired his last enquiry.
‘What’s in there?’ he asked, indicated a large building with red double doors and FIRE HOUSE written above them. Almost smugly Trubshawe said, ‘Why, the fire engine, sir.’
‘Get it out,’ ordered the General.
‘Yes, sir,’ Trubshawe looked as though he had been hit with a halibut. Then he turned, almost apologetically to me.
‘Mr. Niven, get the engine out, please:
‘Very good, sir,’ I said, giving him a real killer look.
‘Sergeant Innes—get the engine out.’
‘Sir!—Corporal MacQuire, th’ engin’—git it oot.’
The buck was now passing with great rapidity. ‘Lance-Corporal Bruce, git th’ engine oot…’
‘Private Dool, git th’ engin’ oot.’
The cry echoed round the Citadel.
The General had started once more on that ominous metronome bit with the leather cosh and the riding boots.
‘What sort of engine is it?’ he asked with ominous calm.
‘Oh—a beauty,’ said Trubshawe.
‘Merryweather,’ I piped up from the back.
‘Yes,’ said Trubshawe, ‘made by Merryweather Company and it has a lot of brasswork and coils and coils of hose.’
‘Get it OUT!’ said the General much louder now.
Trubshawe seemed almost on the point of surrender then, like a lookout at Mafeking seeing relief approaching, he let out a long sigh. A soldier bearing a huge key was approaching at the double from the direction of the Guard Room but I could hardly believe my ears, when I heard Trubshawe pressing his luck.
‘Many’s the night, sir, when this trusty engine has been called out to help the honest burghers of Dover.’
‘Get it out then.’
At last the key was inserted in the lock and with the flourish of a guide at Hampton Court opening the door of Henry VIII’s bed-chamber, Trubshawe pushed open the double doors.
Inside, against the far wall stood two women’s bicycles: a dead Christmas tree from another era lay in the centre of the floor and in the foreground was a bucket of hard and cracked whitewash from a bygone cricket season. The General turned and stalked to his car without a word. The staff officers gave us pitying glances before they followed him. In silence they all drove away and in silence Trubshawe and I returned to the officers’ mess.
In the next few months a tremendous upheaval took place in the battalion. We received a new Commanding Officer; and there was a change of Adjutant. The new Colonel—Alec Telfer-Smollett, D.S.O., M.C.—was nothing short of a miracle. In no time at all he shook the battalion out of its warm climate garrison complex. The whole atmosphere became charged with a sense of purpose. It became possible to perform the dullest chores and at the same time to feel one was doing so for a good reason.
Telfer-Smollett was patience itself with me, in fact he took special pains with all the junior officers to make them feel at home, and I use that word advisedly because he was a firm believer in an ancient concept of a regiment—that it should be a family.
I found myself often dining alone with the Colonel and his wife and, unbelievably, at least twice a week I was invited to play golf with him. He laughed at my tales of Malta, nurtured my flagging military ambitions, sympathised with my permanent financial straits and cheated blatantly in the scoring.
He was a wonderfully warm and understanding human being and came within an are of persuading me to become once more a serious soldier but this was quite unwittingly sabotaged by a petite snub-nosed blonde, very pretty American girl with the smallest feet I had ever seen Barbara Hutton. In the spring of that fateful year, my grandmother died. For years she had lived in rooms in Bournemouth and as children, my sister Grizel and I had paid her annual visits, travelling from the Isle of Wight on a paddle steamer as day trippers. I remember her as a very beautiful old lady with a cloud of carefully coiffed white hair and a little lace choker at her throat kept high under the chin with bones. She had very pale and strangely lifeless skin on her cheeks which I always tried to avoid kissing. She left me, 200 in her will.
I immediately invested about half of this windfall in a second-hand Morris Cowley and gleefully entered the London social scene.
Soon I found myself on the Mayfair hostesses’ lists—as they were desperately short of available young men—and every post brought its quota of invitations to debutantes’ parties or weekends in smart country houses. Dover being nea
r to London and weekend leave plentiful, I indulged myself to the hilt with the minimum of outlay and became a crashing title snob in the process. For a short while I really believed that dukes and baronets were automatically important.
One evening at a dance I met Barbara. She was spending a few weeks in London with her uncle Frank and at the time she was engaged to Alex Mdivani, a Georgian prince who was to be her first husband. A gay and sparkling creature, full of life and laughter, she became a great ally at some of the more pompous functions. When she left London she made me promise to come to New York fbr Christmas, an invitation as lightly made as it was lightly taken.
In November I was sent on a physical training course for several weeks at Aldershot. One night I was called to the telephone and found myself talking to ‘Tommy’ whom I had not teen for over three years.
‘Your mother is very ill,’ he said, ‘she is in a nursing home in London and you should come and see her immediately.’ He gave me very little further information except the address.
I quickly obtained leave and rushed to Queen’s Gate. Although I had seen her only a few weeks before, she was so ravaged by cancer that I was utterly and completely horrified by what I saw. She did not recognise me before she died.
I went back to Aldershot and completed my course in a sort of daze. I simply could not comprehend what had happened. I had never had to cope with a loss of this magnitude and I endlessly chastised myself for always taking her presence for granted, for not doing much, much more to make her happy and for not spending more time with her when I could so easily have done so.
Alec Telfer-Smollett was a father figure and when I got back to Dover he helped me with great wisdom and infinite patience to get over the worst part. With Christmas approaching and with four weeks’ leave coming to me, he suggested that I should go far away somewhere and be with people who could not remind me of what he knew well was a gnawing feeling of guilt. It was then that I remembered Barbara Hutton’s invitation. In reply to my cable asking if she had really meant it, I received one which said—‘Come at once love Barbara.’
I flogged the Morris Cowley, borrowed a little money from the bank and a little more from Grizel who had become a very clever sculptress and was now installed in a tiny house in Chelsea, and ten days before Christmas, I embarked on the one-class liner S.S. Georgic and throbbed my way to New York. Throbbed was the word; I had the cheapest berth in the ship—directly above the propellers.
∨ The Moon’s a Balloon ∧
EIGHT
THE trip from Southampton to New York should have taken eight days but we met a gale head on, so it took ten.
My little throbbing box of a cabin I shared with an enchanting middle-aged American who had been making his first ever visit to Europe on the strength of having sold his clothing store in Milwaukee. He was much exercised by the thought of going home to face, once more, the rigours of Prohibition and during the trip he proceeded to make up for the lean times ahead. He was none too fussy either about mixing his intake.
‘Dave,’ he said, one evening, ‘I’ve gotta a great idea…tonight you and me are gonna drink by colours.’
We settled ourselves at the bar and he decided to drink the colours of the national flags of all the countries he had visited on his trip—Stars and Stripes first of course. Red was easy—port. White was simple—gin, but blue was a real hazard till the barman unveiled a vicious Swiss liqueur called gentiane. The French and British flags fell easily into place but a horrible snag was placed in our path by the Belgians. Black, yellow and red. Black beer was used to lay a foundation for yellow chartreuse and burgundy, but it was the creme de menthe of the Italian flag that caused me to retire leaving my new-found friend the undisputed champion.
The crossing was my first confrontation with Americans en masse and I found it a delightful experience. Their openhanded generosity and genuine curiosity about others came as something of a shock at first. What a change, though, to be asked the most searching personal questions in the first few minutes of contact, or to be treated to a point-by-point replay of the private life of a total stranger. What a difference as an unknown foreigner to be invited to sit at a table of friends or to join a family. I suppose it is the fact that we have fifty-odd million people crammed on to an island the size of Idaho, and unable ever to get more than eighty miles from the sea, that makes us so defensive. Who else but the British would spread hats, handbags, umbrellas and paper bags on the seats of railway carriages and then glower furiously through the windows at anyone who shows signs of entering and ruining our privacy? I had my first brush with the American language in that ship. For a partner in the ping-pong doubles championship, I had snagged a delicious lady from Sioux City. ‘Now we have a practice tomorrow,’ I warned her, ‘if you’re not on deck by eleven o’clock, I’ll come down to your cabin and knock you up.’ She put me straight.
I do not, with my poor pen, have the impertinence to try and describe a first impression of the New York skyline because no one I have ever read has done it justice so far, but that forest of gleaming white set against an ice blue sky is something I will never forget.
Barbara had cabled that she would meet me at the dock so, as the Moran tug company’s fussy little work-horses pushed and tooted us into our berth, I went below and gathered together my hand baggage.
My Milwaukee friend was there having fitted himself into a strange forerunner of today’s space suits. Inside and beneath the armpits were cavernous pockets which concealed large aluminium tanks, each capable of holding about two and a half gallons of Scotch whisky. He was in the process of being topped up by the steward.
He pressed speakeasy cards on me, telephone numbers of friends in New York and issued a permanent invitation to visit with him at his home and meet some lovely people.
‘Goddam Prohibition,’ he muttered as I left, ‘takes a man’s balls off.’ I walked down the gangplank and looked back at the good ship, Georgic. A few years later she was sunk by the Germans. Barbara was waiting for me at the dock and had brought two or three carloads of friends to welcome this strange young man, with the funny voice. I was a bit of a freak in the United States in those days as the vast majority of people had still never met a Briton nor heard an ‘English accent’. Nobody went to see English movies because they couldn’t understand them.
They gave me a rousing reception and I am happy to think that several of those I met on that Christmas Eve are still my friends today.
Barbara’s family lived on Long Island but for a town house they utilised several suites in the Pierre Hotel. I was to be installed there and on the way—it was now growing dark—I beheld a breathtaking sight. The limousine swept round the corner of the Grand Central building and stopped. In the frosty evening, there stretched before me as far as the eye could see, a straight line of enormous illuminated Christmas trees. Also, as far as the eye could see, was a necklace of red lights. Suddenly, these lights changed to green and we shot forward. At that time, traffic lights were only being experimented with in London so I could be forgiven if I was unduly impressed by New York’s Christmas decorations.
I was given a very nice room at the Hotel Pierre and Barbara, the perfect hostess, made it clear that she hoped I would spend as long as I liked there but feel perfectly free to come and go as I wished and not to feel bound to her or her family.
That night, she gave a party at the Central Park Casino. The incomparable Eddie Duchin was at the piano leading his orchestra and a very attractive couple of young ballroom dancers were the stars of the Cabaret—George and Julie Murphy. (George later became Senator from California.)
It may have been Prohibition but so far I had not noticed it. A vague pretence was certainly made to keep bottles out of sight and many people made extra trips to the lavatory or to their cars to uncork a flask there, but otherwise it was business as usual.
Christmas Day with Barbara’s family and presents for the unknown young man of Homeric generosity. Next a visit to Princeton to w
atch the annual football battle with Yale. The trip to Princeton was organised by a cousin of Barbara’s Woolworth Donahue—and for the occasion, for our comfort and refreshment, he thoughtfully provided a special coach on the train. The long ride passed in a flash. The men were all about my own age and the girls were the result of their very competitive selection for this high point of the College year. The result was spectacular. I had never seen such beautiful girls in my life and there were more to come. Jack and Marshall Hemingway were our hosts at Princeton and there the train group joined about forty more for a colossal spread before the game. Finally, we set off for the Stadium and our wonderful, wonderful girls. Coonskin and camel-hair coats were very much in evidence. I didn’t see very much of the game. Once the college bands had left the pitch to the players, excitement was at such boiling point that the moment anything important happened, everyone leaped to his feet thereby obscuring my view. I did not have the same built-in springs in my knees as the others and trained, as I was, in the Twickenham school of indulging in ‘a little polite hand clapping while seated, the most exciting moments were blanketed by vast expanses of coonskin and camel-hair…but no matter, I had a wonderful day and have since become an aficionado of American football. The days in New York passed in a blaze of parties, speakeasies and nightclubs with daytime forays to visit people on Long Island, sometimes in specially chartered and barequipped motor buses. There were also boxing matches and ice hockey games to see at Madison Square Garden, big Broadway musicals to visit, great bands and singers to listen to.
The headquarters of the group I was adopted by was Jack Charlie’s ‘21’ Club—the best speakeasy in New York run by goodlooking Jack Kriendler and the amiable rotund and folksy Charlie Burns. The doorman was named ‘Red’ and ‘Jim’ was the watchdog peering through the bullet-proof door. If an alarm was given of an impending raid by the law, the first thought was to protect the customers—no one would be caught drinking—so waiters were trained to seize all bottles and glasses from the tables and put them on the bar where ‘Gus’ the barman was in position to throw a switch, the whole bar then tilted up and the offending evidence slid down a chute to the cellar.