Along with an endless supply of cockroaches and faulty plumbing, the other thing that excited Dee about the Chelsea Hotel was the shabby restaurant on the ground floor, called El Quijote. As soon as I arrived in New York she instructed me ‘to get my arse downtown’ so she and Hylan could take me to El Quijote for one of their famous $6 lobster meals. As we sat in a cosy booth at the back of the restaurant cracking open the shells of our lobsters, she told me how she’d had enough of ‘silly old Freddie’, and that England had stopped feeling like her kind of place. I told her how sad and lonely her house looked without them and that I missed having her around, even if I was away at school most of the time. As I climbed into a cab to head back uptown, her parting words were, ‘If it gets too much at that snobby private school, come and live in New York.’ An appealing thought, but one of those mad ideas I decided not to think about – for the time being.
The Norwegian tall ship Sørlandet
After learning to sail in Connecticut when I was fifteen, Nelson Aldrich had tried to encourage my parents to let me continue with it, but there were few opportunities for sailing in London. Then at Bedales I discovered it was offered as a general study in the summer term. The course involved navigation and theory, which we did in the classroom, followed by a weekend sailing on the English Channel. Having got the bug, I’d written to Nelson to ask if he knew anyone who might need a crew at their local yacht club in Connecticut. Before we left for New York, he called to say he’d found a sail training company offering places on an old Norwegian tall ship called the Sørlandet. It was a 210-foot, three-mast square rigger sailing from Nova Scotia to England, an Atlantic crossing that would take a gruelling two and a half weeks. Apart from a cross-Channel ferry, the only boat Mum and Dad had ever set foot on was a rowing boat on the lake in Regent’s Park, so they had no concept of what sailing across an ocean would involve, or just how dangerous it would be. Dad had romantic ideas of ancient mariners, Mutiny on the Bounty and Captain Bligh, and with that booked me a place.
In the middle of August, just as I was getting used to long lazy brunches and the gentle pace of life on the farm in Connecticut, Mum and Nelson drove me up to Boston and put me on a plane to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I joined the Sørlandet for its Atlantic crossing.
The next day we slipped gracefully out to sea and crossed the Grand Banks into the North Atlantic, where for the next few weeks I fought off overwhelming seasickness and incredible storms. I climbed the ship’s three 115-foot masts and shimmied along the many yardarms to furl sails in the middle of the night and was nearly washed overboard (twice). I also learned about celestial navigation and tying knots. At one point I was coerced into joining a small group of trainees who’d come on the trip dressed as 19th-century sailors and stood around in a tight circle singing sea shanties.
When we finally sailed into Southampton, there was no ceremony on our arrival; no flags, bunting or brass bands playing on the quayside as I’d hoped. There’d been no way of letting Mum and Dad know the date or time of my arrival, so there was no one there from my family to meet me either. I disembarked from the ship and made my way back to London on a slow train that rattled its way through Hampshire and Surrey. The lush, dense greenness of the English countryside, still basking in a late summer, was like a kind of snow-blindness after thousands of miles of open-ocean nothingness. Back in London I hauled my enormous kit bag up from the Underground station to Gloucester Crescent and walked through the front door to find everyone out. I closed the door behind me and stood, for a moment, completely alone in the front hall. Our hall always felt like the wings of a theatre, where people waited to go on stage for the performance of ‘Miller family life’, only on this occasion the theatre was completely empty and I felt overwhelmed by its silence. It was the first I’d experienced in weeks. The ground was still swaying beneath my feet, but as I tried to orientate myself I felt strangely lost and subdued. I knew that in a few days’ time I’d be back at school, and I suddenly longed for my family to come home from wherever they were so I could tell them my stories from the high seas.
30
THE FINE WINES OF BORDEAUX
I’ve always found it interesting to look at the contrasts in one’s life and see how things can change so completely and unexpectedly over time. In September 1979 Conrad and I were still at Pimlico and started the school year travelling on the 24 bus, where we felt demoralised and intimidated, knowing that when we got off we’d have to slip into school and try our best to avoid running into the waiting bullies. The following September that all changed: we were on our way to Bedales and so excited and full of optimism. Then, another twelve months on, and for our last ever year at school, we were driven by Conrad’s mum to the courtyard of Kensington Palace, where we met up with Sarah Armstrong-Jones. From there, along with our trunks, we were driven on to school by Princess Margaret’s chauffeur, Mr Griffin, in a shiny black Range Rover.
I started my last year at Bedales with the best of intentions, having taken a long hard look at what my teachers and the headmaster had written in my report the term before. They all said if I just stuck to the facts and focused on answering the questions in a way that related to the syllabus I might actually have a chance of getting the grades I needed to study psychology at university; otherwise it was back to farming. After the disaster of my mock exams I decided to take their advice and commit myself to hours of revision. As I settled down to work, some of the optimism and the dreams I’d had in my first term at Bedales returned. I’d also put Dad’s books back on his shelves and knuckled down to reading the ones I’d been given by my teachers.
Knowing that I only had three terms left, I also decided to throw myself into everything else the school had to offer. I joined a committee (to encourage the younger boys to clean their rooms), sang in the chamber choir, performed in another production of Noah’s Flood, although this time I was a goat and the orchestra were all over the place. I played a mute peasant in a loincloth in a production of A Passage to India, and to everyone’s surprise, including my own, I took part in team sports. Taking part in sports was non-existent at home. In fact, the words ‘team sports’ didn’t feature in the Gloucester Crescent lexicon: the only people who took any interest in sport (as spectators only) and supported a team were Mary-Kay’s two boys, Sam and Will, who were both under ten and mad about football, and – astonishingly – Freddie Ayer, who was a lifelong Spurs supporter. No one in the Crescent took their children to play football in the park, although Hylan once tried to get all the parents together to take the children on in a game of baseball, but that ended when Dad got hit on the head with the ball and he went home in a huff.
When I arrived at Bedales, I was told by various people that the school didn’t really do sports. Still, in winter white lines were carefully painted on the games pitches for football and hockey. Then in the summer term the grass was cut and they were converted for tennis and cricket, with nets and sight screens erected on the boundaries. Our despondent games master, Phil, had played for Portsmouth FC and lived for a small group who took sport seriously. He was so desperate to make up a team that if you happened to put your hand up for a game of cricket or football you’d find yourself enrolled in the school’s First XI. Having discovered early on that I was rubbish at football, I opted for hockey in the winter and cricket in the summer and became a combination of team mascot and figure of fun. Cricket was the game of gentlemen, and I found I could at least catch a ball. There was the added advantage of teas in the pavilion and, best of all, the chance to stand around dressed in cricket whites, looking like an extra from Brideshead. Come the following summer term, I raised my hand and was duly invited by Phil to join the First XI. This turned out to be a smarter tactic on his part than anyone originally thought.
Realising just how dreadful I was, he came up with a cunning strategy which involved sending me out to bat first. This would inevitably lead to me being bowled out first ball, for a ‘golden duck’. These two words were often used by
the rest of the team to put me down, but they were part of the cricketing vocabulary which I found so appealing. ‘Leather on willow’ was another, and without my ever getting one to make contact with the other, the opposing team would assume the rest of us were as rubbish at cricket as me. This gave Phil the chance to play his secret weapon – Billy and his gang of Angry Young Men. They turned out not only to be successful with the girls but also reasonably good at sports. Having caught the other team off guard, Billy and his mates would breeze onto the pitch and basically rough the other team up before tea.
Back in the classroom my enthusiasm for my subjects soon started to fade as I fell further behind. When, at the beginning of the autumn term, Harry suggested I think about applying to study psychology, I went to visit universities at York, Nottingham and Bristol. None of them excited me, and in each case I left feeling that studying psychology for three years was unlikely to set me up for life, and I always felt relieved to get back to Bedales. In an attempt to get me to focus, I was given a new study on the other side of the science block. I shared it with only one other person: a girl called Suzy, whose family lived on a farm in Cornwall and kept horses. She’d brought one of these horses with her to school, a chestnut Arab stallion which she kept in a field between the art block and the headmaster’s house. Despite my lack of sporting skills I had at least learned to ride reasonably well in Scotland, and Suzy let me borrow her horse whenever I wanted, so I’d saddle it up and ride for hours in the hills around the school.
One Sunday afternoon I rode across Stoner Hill to visit a girl called Caroline. She was a very beautiful day-girl I had a crush on, who didn’t board and lived with her parents in Oakshott. She had rather flirtatiously challenged me to ride over the hill to see her, on the promise that her parents would be out at church. Like a character from a Jane Austen novel, I rode all the way to Oakshott and tied the horse to the fence outside their house. Letting myself in through a side door I crept upstairs to her bedroom. I wasn’t entirely sure what I thought I was going to do with Caroline, or expected her to do with me, but before she’d finished showing me her large collection of gymkhana rosettes I heard her over-protective parents’ car coming up the drive. Within seconds I was down the stairs, out the door and on my horse, galloping back over the hill before her father could find his shotgun.
One of the other signs of the influence of Brideshead Revisited was the desire by some of my schoolfriends to relive parts of it by dressing up like Charles and Sebastian. During the holidays we scoured vintage clothing shops and returned to school dressed in tweed suits or blazers with braiding or white cricket flannels. As we got into character, Conrad and a friend called Julia decided that we should go to one of the famous public school balls. Having studied The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, they fell upon the biggest (and worst) of them all – the Feathers Charity Ball, which took place the week before Christmas at the Hammersmith Palais to raise money for good causes. The Feathers was traditionally attended by boys from Eton, Harrow and Westminster, along with girls from St Mary’s in Ascot, Wycombe Abbey and Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Up to this point in the Feathers’ history I’m not sure a Bedalian had ever attended it, but Conrad and Julia thought it would be the perfect ball to try out and an opportunity to dress up and show other public schools that Bedalians weren’t the bohemian rabble most of them thought we were.
Left to right: Remy Blumenfeld, Conrad, Stephen Battle, Tom Salter, Joshua White and me
Twelve of us bought tickets – six boys and six girls – and the pre-ball dinner was held at Conrad’s house in Gloucester Crescent, where his mother cooked an enormous meal with poached salmon and pavlova, which turned out to be the most enjoyable part of the evening. Everyone made an effort to dress the part, with the boys either renting black tie dinner suits or borrowing them from their fathers. The girls came in ball gowns, which either belonged to their mothers, and had last been worn in the 1960s, or they’d gone to frock shops in Chelsea and spent a fortune.
After dinner, some of the parents agreed to drive us all to Hammersmith and collect us afterwards. As we stood outside Conrad’s house waiting to get into the cars, a group of the Crescent’s residents, including Tom and Conrad’s brothers, came out to watch us leave. We were filled with pride, and to begin with thought they’d gathered to admire our outfits and wish us luck, but we soon realised their intention was to make fun of us and comment on the absurdity of what we were doing. ‘Bloody hypocrites,’ one of my Bedalian friends said as we got into the car. ‘Every one of your neighbours went to public school, and I bet half of them practically slept in their tuxedos when they went to university.’
The first thing that hits you when you walk into the Hammersmith Palais is the sticky heat and a stifling smell of sweat mixed with cheap aftershave and sickly perfume. By ten o’clock it was even worse and the ballroom had become a seething mass of gyrating teenagers, many so drunk they had to be escorted to the bathrooms to throw up. In the darker corners of the hall were girls snogging boys they’d only just met that night.
It doesn’t take long to realise that at the Feathers you either dance or stand around looking like a nesting emperor penguin in your tuxedo. With this in mind I decided to pluck up the courage to approach a girl who’d been smiling at me for some time from across the room. To my surprise she said yes and we energetically threw ourselves around the floor, arms shooting into the air then down to the floor as we danced to the Bee Gees’ ‘Night Fever’. This was followed by a slow dance, which allowed me to put my arms around her waist and pull her close. As we shifted awkwardly around the dance floor, she shouted into my ear over the noise of the music, ‘Are you an heir?’ To begin with I thought I misheard, but she said it again.
‘Heir to what?’ I replied, to which she stopped dancing, rolled her eyes and stalked off.
At the stroke of midnight the huge overhead lights of the ballroom came on as if a fairy godmother had waved her wand and put an end to the revelry. The dishevelled and disorderly mass of tuxedos and ball gowns moved slowly and unsteadily out onto the Shepherd’s Bush Road in search of the parents who’d been waiting patiently in their cars lined up along the pavement as far as Brook Green.
I was relieved to find it was Conrad’s mother rather than my dad waiting for us outside the Palais. There was nothing I liked about the Feathers Ball, but Dad would have found the sight of hordes of overprivileged drunk public-school kids enough to make him get out the car and sing ‘The Red Flag’ at the top of his voice. He might have had a point, but I was proud of my Bedalian friends, who may not have been heirs to anything but behaved with dignity all evening and knew how to hold their drink.
There was another activity I threw myself into at school that term, and that was learning to drive. I set myself the challenge of passing the test before my eighteenth birthday. I found a driving instructor in Petersfield who gave me lessons every week. He was a man of few words, apart from ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘ahead’ and ‘stop’ – the rest he left to a series of exaggerated hand movements. We drove for miles around country lanes and main roads and then the back streets of Petersfield, where we practised parking and three-point turns. One day, on about the fourth lesson, we pulled into the school car park and out of nowhere he asked, ‘Isn’t there a member of the royal family at this school?’ And that was it, until a couple of lessons later, when he came out with, ‘Aren’t there are a lot of theatre types at this school?’ This time there was a pause before he asked, ‘Your father, I don’t suppose it’s Arthur Miller by any chance?’ I didn’t answer but smiled knowingly, hoping he might think I was the secret child of Marilyn Monroe.
On the day of my driving test he let me drive to the test centre in Chichester as he sat silently staring out of the side-window. Other learner drivers at school had warned me about a notorious examiner known as ‘the Roundabout Executioner’, who liked to fail everyone on their first test. As luck would have it, he was my examiner that day – and I failed. On my second a
ttempt I had a kind lady examiner who passed me, wished me luck and gave me a short speech on how speed kills and how I wasn’t to go showing off to the girls.
In the spring term one of the choices on offer for general studies was wine tasting. Its purpose was to teach us to drink responsibly by way of an appreciation for fine wines. Although I’d never been one of them, this course was the tip of the iceberg in a campaign to stop Bedalians sneaking off into the woods with bottles of vodka and getting completely off their heads. The course took place one afternoon a week in the sitting room of a housemistress’s flat in the girls’ house. Her husband, Keith, taught physics and was an easy-going and much-liked Australian with a passion for wine. Each week the group would show up at their flat to find a large illustrated map stuck on the wall showing the wine region he planned to introduce us to that day. The various wines were set out on the coffee table, along with a wedge of cheese and some water biscuits. This was just enough to give the class a taste of the wines without any of us getting drunk.
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