by Mark Colvin
We spent a huge amount of time in the Science Museum, with its vast array of interactive exhibits for children, and the Natural History Museum. I was allowed to go to Earl’s Court for the Boat Show, the Motor Show and the Ideal Home Exhibition. I took Zoë in consecutive years to the Daily Mail Boys’ & Girls’ Exhibition—she reminds me now that the best year was the one when there were Daleks. We went to St Paul’s together, trying out the Whispering Gallery and clambering up the ladder to peer out of the very top of Christopher Wren’s great dome. Zoë says I told her that a threepenny bit dropped from that height would go straight through a man’s skull, an urban myth she claims to have believed for decades. (To save you looking it up, air resistance explains why it doesn’t happen.) I was full of stuff like that, from incessant reading of books like Ripley’s Believe It or Not and The Guinness Book of Records.
I explored London on my red Dawes three-speed bicycle. At eleven, I still had the wooden toy sailing boat, named after Captain Cook’s Endeavour, that I’d been given when I was six, and I’d go to Kensington Gardens to sail it on the Round Pond and admire the vast radio-controlled sloops and motor-torpedo-boats that adult nerds raced across the waters. Mum got our first car, a Mini station wagon with wood panels, and we sat in tailbacks on the road to Cornish holidays, having long stupid conversations as characters called Nigel and Daphne, inspired by BBC Radio’s Round the Horne.
Australia was never far from my mind, for various reasons, including our regular visits to the Prince’s Gate flat of my mother’s great-aunt Ethel and her husband, the former Australian prime minister Stanley Bruce. ‘Uncle S’, as we called him, had stood in for my grandfather and given Mum away at the altar in 1948. The Bruces were childless themselves, and they’d taken my mother with them around war-ravaged Europe when she’d arrived in London from Victoria in the late 1940s.
Uncle S died when I was fifteen, still just too young to appreciate all his stories about Churchill, Earle Page and Billy Hughes, but old enough to appreciate his warm and engaging personality. Far from the caricature spats-wearing toff who lost his own seat when he lost government in 1929, he was a raconteur and a charmer: a fund of stories about sport, food, wine and Australian and international history. I remember that it was not always the political achievements that he relished in old age, or at least he showed appreciation for the things he thought might interest a small boy: among them, his trophy cabinet, made out of a piece of his winning Cambridge boat, and the silver tasting-cup, on a silver chain, of the exclusive Burgundy wine society, the Chevaliers du Tastevin.
But his post-political career, as an international diplomat and statesman, was no swan song: if anything, it was more substantial than his time in the Australian Parliament. He renegotiated the country’s crippling loans with Britain, became president of the Montreux conference of the League of Nations, advised on the British abdication crisis, and constantly tried to ensure that Britain would give cast-iron guarantees to come to Australia’s aid in the event of attack by Japan.
Stanley Bruce had been seriously wounded at Gallipoli, and his most surprising friendship was with Kemal Ataturk, who had commanded the troops on the other side. They negotiated a difficult League of Nations treaty together in the 1930s, and one of Uncle S’ prized possessions was a solid-gold cigarette case that Ataturk had made for him, with their engraved initials interlaced, which now resides in the National Archives in Canberra: the Turkish ambassador and I were filmed holding it carefully in gloved hands for the Anzac anniversary in 2015.
As high commissioner and a member of Churchill’s War Cabinet, Uncle S was the principal conduit between Britain and Australia throughout World War II. And after the war, pursuing his interest in eradicating starvation and poverty, he played a key part in the foundation of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, and became chairman of its World Food Council. I feel privileged to have known him.
The house my mother bought in 1955 had been on the outer edge of a decaying and deeply unfashionable neighbourhood. But as the 1960s became the Swinging Sixties, it was (though the word had not then been invented) ‘gentrifying’ fast, and King’s Road, Chelsea was the place to be. Local shops were being replaced by record stores and ‘men’s boutiques’, which the jazzman George Melly defined at the time by saying that in the latter, the salesman would ask: ‘Shirt, sir? Measure your inside leg, sir?’
But much of the old remained. There was the Chelsea Public Library opposite the Fire Station, where my mother took us at least every week. And the Chelsea Bookshop, where we would go with the book tokens we were given by relatives at Christmas or on birthdays. The two middle-aged ladies who ran it—one was some sort of exiled Polish countess, I believe—were an odd combination of stern and indulgent, but they usually had recommendations for books just right for us. Mother would treat us to occasional lunches at Le Reve, a little, inexpensive French bistro. Afterwards, we’d go up the road to browse in a large and copiously stocked toyshop called Laffeaty’s, either to gawp and think hopeful thoughts about Christmas, or to spend all our pocket money. On the way home, we’d walk past the magnificent blue-and-white-tiled Art-Deco Bluebird Garage, before passing the Ming Yuan Chinese restaurant, directly opposite my father’s first-floor flat in Alexandra Mansions.
Apart from the looming dread of school as the end of holidays approached, and despite the divorce, life in Chelsea was good.
* * *
Christmas 1964, the year of Beatles for Sale, is spent at my aunt and uncle’s house in Hampshire. I have ‘Eight Days a Week’ in my head as I sit in the bedroom I share with my father, trying to master the most abstruse tense in ancient Greek, the aorist, with the crucial Common Entrance Exam only months away. I’m not alone. My father is working his way through a pile of economics textbooks. And neither of us is enjoying it.
That’s literally the only thing I know about Dad’s role in the SIS from 1964 to late 1966: that he was on some sort of economics desk. But it was clear that if economics is, as the old line goes, ‘The Dismal Science’, it didn’t suit Dad at all.
If I’ve given an Ian Fleming or John le Carré impression of John Colvin as a man, I’ve done him a disservice, because he was neither a square-jawed action hero by nature, nor a taciturn George Smiley. Being with him was usually a lot of fun. He was an extrovert—too extroverted, his colleague Alexis Forter told me much later in life, ever to rise to the very top of the SIS—and a party animal. He came alive in company, was witty and flirtatious, drank too much, smoked too much, and was never happier than when talking at length about politics, literature (he was almost obsessive about Proust) and whatever else caught his eye. Riding around London on the top of buses—the smoking deck—what caught his eye was often a ‘verrrry pretty girl, look, over there’.
Where did we go on those double-deckers? Quite often to the movies. I remember the hilarity of Cat Ballou with Jane Fonda and Lee Marvin, a Laurel and Hardy/Harold Lloyd double bill, and a couple of Jack Lemmon films, along with Let’s Make Love, in which Marilyn Monroe’s rendition of ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ should have had an X-rating all of its own: certainly an eye-opener for a twelve-year-old.
One night in the winter of 1964–65, Dad took me to see Spike Milligan in Son of Oblomov. It had started as Oblomov, a fairly turgid nineteenth-century Russian play about a man undergoing an existential crisis who decides to spend his whole life in bed. But it quickly became the hottest ticket in town when the producers changed the name and reworked the show because Spike was incapable of sticking to the script. He forbade the rest of the cast to stray from their lines, while he ad-libbed throughout. It must have been terrifying for the supporting cast, but for the audience, especially me, it was a glimpse of utter comic anarchy. Spike heckled the audience mercilessly. One of his tricks was to get a couple of minutes in, pick on a latecomer by chiding them for missing the beginning, then start the play again, ripping through the lines in a high-pitched voice like a tape at double-speed. And he constantly
‘corpsed’ (provoked) his fellow actors, leaving them either open-mouthed and goldfishing for a line or doubled up with laughter. Some of them didn’t like it much—there was reputedly a very high cast turnover—and eventually Spike’s swings between manic and depressive became too wild for the show to continue.
We also made trips to the East End to eat great Chinese food. Dad’s experience in Malaysia, and later Saigon, meant that he had little time for the standard sweet-and-sour-pork/chow mein menus which local places like the Ming Yuan served up to Westerners. So we took the bus out to Limehouse, London’s original Chinatown, to eat at the Old Friends and the New Friends, the best Chinese places in the city at the time. He taught me to use chopsticks, drink jasmine tea, and appreciate flavours I’d never encountered, such as ginger and garlic and coriander, and the texture of jellyfish and chicken feet and black tree-fungi. On the way, I saw a side of London I’d not known before: twenty years after the war, whole blocks of empty space and rubble, the East End, still mostly unbuilt after the Luftwaffe bombed it.
On birthdays, however, my parents would get together in the most civilised fashion to take us to La Poule au Pot, a French restaurant in Pimlico started by a friend, David Hall, where I ate my first avocado and my first artichoke, among other rarities then almost unheard of in the British kitchen.
At Dad’s flat, Zoë and I listened to comedy records. The genius of Shelley Berman, bits of whose stand-up monologues about hangovers (‘My teeth itch’, ‘Stop fizzing, Alka-Seltzer’), or trying to navigate a department store switchboard to alert them to a woman hanging by her fingertips from their window (‘Hullo, you don’t know me but I work in the building across the street and I was looking out my window … Yes, lovely day isn’t it … when I saw …’), my sister and I can still recite impromptu. And the deadpan joy of discovering Peter Cook’s man in a raincoat on a park bench, EL Wisty: ‘I could have been a judge, but I never ’ad the Latin,’ and ‘I’ll tell you the interesting fact about the Arab. The interesting fact about the Arab is that he can go for a whole year on one grain of rice … No, that’s the mosquito. I get those muddled up because they’re next door to each other in the dictionary: mosquitos and mosques.’ Thanks to EL Wisty, whose voice his resembled, I was never able to take John Major entirely seriously as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Britain and Northern Ireland, no doubt a sign of my lifelong tendency to facetiousness, largely nurtured by Cook and Dudley Moore.
What’s now called ‘cool’ was then called ‘with-it’, and my father was alarmingly with-it for a man in his forties. At a time when standard office wear was a white shirt and a suit, he was the first parent I ever saw in a pink shirt under his pinstripe worsted. Zoë and I and our cousins will never forget the hilarity of watching him, on the rear deck of a fishing smack off Cornwall in 1962, singing Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ while doing the dance. One day in 1965, he put a 45 on the turntable in the flat and played me The Who’s new single, ‘My Generation’. It was a bit disconcerting: by definition, that was supposed to be my thing. It was the attitude he liked: ‘Why don’t you all f-f-f-f-f-f-fade away’. It could be a bit difficult to start a teenage rebellion against a man like that.
Years later, after Dad died, his old friend and shipmate Rowan Ayers told me a story about how my father, aged eighteen, had put on a surrealist play in the wardroom of a Royal Navy cruiser in Scapa Flow, part of which involved standing with one foot in a bucket of water tearing up ten-shilling notes. I often wonder what sort of life he would have led if not for the navy and the war. Actor? Writer? Artistic enfant terrible?
Not that life with Dad was all idyllic. We spent one ghastly holiday in England’s Lake District, in a village called, unprepossessingly, Boot. It was as bad as it sounds. We were supposed to be trout-fishing, but few trout seemed willing to cooperate. I can’t do better in describing that holiday than to quote my sister Zoë, blogging in 2010:
My father did once manage to catch my brother when hurling out his line. Instead of hitting the water, his hook plunged right through the flesh between thumb and forefinger on my brother’s right hand. My father reacted with an uncharacteristic display of Edwardian outrage when my brother quite naturally let out a loud yell of pain. ‘No son of mine should ever admit to pain’, he shouted, an outburst that must surely have been the product of frustration after so many wasted, fish-free hours.
My father was in the grip of one of his periodic bouts of hypochondria—centring, on this occasion, on his digestive system—so instead of going anywhere we stayed at ‘home’ and listened to him groan.
Perhaps it was the food that did it—it turned out to be unspeakable (far worse even than school). It was provided in the upstairs dining-room of the pub across the road from our cottage, but after a day or two of being faced with dishes that played variations on the colour khaki and always arrived cold and covered by a slick of something that looked very like the stuff filling the Gulf of Mexico at the moment, we gave up going.
There was an alternative—the one and only edible item offered for sale by the village shop. It was a locally made substance called Kendall’s Mint Cake and, according to its wrapper, it was exceptionally nutritious. How lucky it was, since we ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day until we were released—I mean, until it was time to go home. At least my brother and I did. My father ate nothing. Progressively more convinced that his days were numbered, he would sit on the front step in the weak afternoon sunshine, holding his head, sighing, very close to tears. My brother and I, clutching our slabs of Kendall’s, would sit on each side of him, munching steadily, trying, always unsuccessfully, to think of something that might cheer him up.
I should point out that I am not being heartless about my father’s sufferings—he really was all right. When the ‘holiday’ was over and we returned down south, he consulted a number of Harley Street specialists and not one of them could find anything wrong at all. Eventually, dispirited and still deep in the clutches of his symptoms, he stepped out of yet another great man’s consulting rooms and into a nearby pub. ‘You look rough, guv’, the landlord informed him, by way of greeting. Once again my father unfurled his tale of woe. The landlord listened and then reached behind him for a packet of tablets. ‘These should fix you up’, he said. ‘They’re made in Switzerland and they worked wonders for me.’ And they did—my father took one that day and never had to take another. He had to have them in the house though. That was all that mattered. If he didn’t have them in the bathroom cupboard, the wracking pains returned.
I believe that was the summer of 1965, when I was thirteen and my sister nearly ten. It must have been early the next year when my mother and sister went to visit relatives in Australia, leaving me in London: I was due back at Westminster for the spring term, and so was unable to join them. As a consolation prize, my father took me to Paris for a long weekend, my first proper introduction to the city. We ate in good small restaurants, where I was allowed to drink a little wine. It snowed, but we walked along the Left Bank anyway, and browsed the bookstalls, visited the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume Gallery (the vastly superior forerunner of the Musée d’Orsay), and went one night to an extraordinary, smoky basement nightclub which I believe was called Le Canari, run by an old Gitanes-smoking ruffian who had certainly done something secret with my dad during or after the war. There were no half-naked ladies or other signs of outright vice, but there was something fantastically, as the French say, louche, about the place, and my father, though not always louche himself, somehow fitted right in. He had something of the chameleon about him, obviously, whether by nature or by training: the spy’s ability to be at home in, or fade into the background of, wherever he was.
The next summer was very different. It was hot, for one thing. We went to the Algarve, a stretch of Portuguese coastline then almost undiscovered by tourists. The SIS had an earlier retirement age than the Foreign Office—fifty-five—and Dad’s old colleague Christopher Wren had retired to the
Algarve with his French wife, Marciane, an acidulous woman who took a fairly instant dislike to me and Zoë. She described me, my father told me later, as ‘ingrat’, and made plain that she understood the French word to mean both ungrateful and ungracious. I was a pasty, resentful, fourteen-year-old, sure enough, but probably no more so than the average. I feel I was more shy and gawky than obstreperous, but to a childless couple like the Wrens I probably seemed an excrescence.
I was admittedly, by this time, already steeped in the attitudes of what pop had become—a new wave, now called rock, in which lyrics were suddenly as often about contempt and dislike as about love. John Lennon had written ‘Nowhere Man’, The Kinks were doing social criticism with ‘Well-Respected Man’ and ‘Dedicated Follower of Fashion’, The Who released ‘Substitute’, full of anger about class and money, and ‘I’m a Boy’, which seemed to be an early exploration of transgender issues. And Dylan’s songs had turned merciless, mocking the clueless Mr Jones, or bitterly telling false friends what a drag it was to see them. The curled lip was everywhere: on the white laminate front of the raised demonstration desk in one of the Westminster School science labs, someone had written in large letters in indelible ink ‘Hey! You! Get Offa My Cloud!’ directly below where the master stood. We were the baby boomers, though I don’t think I knew the phrase then, and we were out to show that we were not our parents’ generation. But we were also, I’m sure, just another bunch of obnoxious teenagers.
An added reason for feeling inadequate and resentful was puberty itself. Also staying in the Wren’s place in Portugal was Helen Chavchavadze, divorced wife of an exiled Georgian prince who just happened to be a senior CIA man. Helen was a beautiful and intelligent woman who, it has emerged in recent years, had been one of the many lovers of US President Kennedy. She and my father conducted a fairly consistent flirtation throughout our stay. His evident ease with women could hardly have been a starker contrast to my tongue-tied, single-sex-schooled inability to know how to talk to her daughter Maria, or Moussie, who was my age and staying there too.