Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

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  About Basil Street Blues

  About Michael Holroyd

  Reviews

  Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs

  Biographies by Michael Holroyd

  Table of Contents

  www.headofzeus.com

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  List of Illustrations

  Epigraph

  PART I

  Chapter 1: Two Types of Ambiguity

  Chapter 2: With Virginia Woolf at Sheffield Place

  Chapter 3: The Swedish Experiment

  Chapter 4: Links in the Chain

  Chapter 5: The Breves Process: Tea into Glass

  Chapter 6: The Coming of Agnes May

  Chapter 7: A Triumph and Disaster

  INTERVAL

  Chapter 8: Literary Lapses

  PART II

  Chapter 9: Some Wartime Diversions

  Chapter 10: Notes from Norhurst

  Chapter 11: Yolande’s Story

  Chapter 12: Scaitcliffe Revisited

  Chapter 13: Three Weddings and a Funeral

  Chapter 14: Eton

  Chapter 15: Legal and Military

  Chapter 16: The Third Mrs Nares

  Chapter 17: Flight into Surrey

  Chapter 18: Scenes from Provincial and Metropolitan Life

  Chapter 19: Missing Persons

  ENVOI

  Chapter 20: Things Past

  Preview

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix: Four Family Trees

  About Basil Street Blues

  Reviews

  About Michael Holroyd

  Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs

  Biographies by Michael Holroyd

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  List of Illustrations

  My grandparents with their children at Windsor: Kenneth (left), Basil (middle) and Yolande.

  My Swedish grandmother, Kaja, Stockholm c.1913.

  The schoolboy at Eton.

  The novelist in London.

  Brocket in the 1920s.

  My father with his schnauzer puppy.

  Ulla, my mother, when she arrived in England c.1934.

  My mother during her cancer treatment.

  Haselhurst c.1940.

  My aunt Yolande in the 1920s.

  The author of Mosaic (photograph © by John Foley).

  Philippa: while writing Frank Harris.

  Agnes May: the hand-painted photograph commissioned by my grandfather c.1928.

  Illustrations of two light fittings by the author’s father.

  ‘The past puts a fine edge on our own days. It tells us more of the present than the present can tell us.’

  William Gerhardie, ‘An Historical Credo’

  The Romanovs, An Evocation of the Past as a Mirror for the Present

  PART I

  1

  Two Types of Ambiguity

  Towards the end of the nineteen-seventies I asked my parents to let me have some account of their early lives. I had never been interested in my family. My career as a biographer probably arose from my need to escape from family involvements and immerse myself in other people’s lives. ‘We don’t go to Heaven in families any more – but one by one.’ I remember how struck I was when I came across this sentence in Gwen John’s correspondence. That was certainly how I felt. I also remember quoting in my first biography Hugh Kingsmill’s aphorism: ‘Friends are God’s apology for families,’ and feeling a chord of agreement.

  My parents, who had long been divorced, and gone through a couple of subsequent marriages, each of them, as well as various additional liaisons, were by the late nineteen-seventies living alone in fragile health and meagre circumstances. They appeared bewildered by the rubble into which everything was collapsing. After all, it had started so promisingly.

  The accounts they wrote were very different. This did not surprise me. They had seldom agreed about anything, not even the date of my birth. As a gesture of tact I preserved two birthdays forty-eight hours apart, one for each of them. This had begun as a joke, grew into a habit and finally became a rather ageing conceit which will enable me to claim by the year 2000 the wisdom of a 130-year-old.

  My parents’ marriage was something of a mystery to me. What did they have in common? After the age of six I seldom saw them together and could imagine few people more dissimilar. What few scraps of memory I retained brought back echoes of reverberating arguments that floated up to me as I lay in a dark bedroom in the north of England – echoes that, to gain popularity, I would later assemble into dramatic stories for the school dormitory. A breadknife flashed in the dark, a line of blood suddenly appeared, and we shivered delightedly in our beds. But I have few actual memories of my very early years, few recollections of my childhood I can trust, and not many of adolescence. There were probably good reasons for this erasure, though I am hoping that some events may stir from their resting place and rise to the surface as I write.

  I was born in the summer of 1935. My mother was Swedish, and my father thought of himself as English, though his mother actually came from the south of Ireland and his paternal grandmother was Scottish. All I knew was that my parents had met on a boat in the North Sea, got along fine on water, then fairly soon after striking land, dashed their marriage on the rocks. I had been conceived, my mother once remarked as we were travelling by bus through Knightsbridge, at the Hyde Park Hotel where King Gustav of Sweden (calling himself Colonel Gustaveson) often stayed. I remember her laughing as we swayed into Sloane Street and travelled on. At another time, in a taxi, she pointed to the Basil Street Hotel with a similar laugh before turning into Sloane Street.

  I was largely brought up in the Home Counties by my paternal grandparents and a tennis-playing aunt. But there were irregular intervals, sometimes at odd places abroad, with unfamiliar step-parents who, like minor characters in a badly-managed melodrama, would introduce themselves with a flourish, a bray of trumpets, and then inexplicably disappear. Perhaps the peculiar enchantment that sustained and integrated narratives, enriched with involving plots, were to hold for me sprang from my sense of being brought up by so many characters – parental, step-parental and grand-parental characters – who seldom met, showed little interest in one another, and apparently possessed no connecting story.

  In some respects my father had a ‘good war’, or so I believed. But he could not adjust to the peace afterwards. Though increasingly impoverished, he somehow found (I never knew how) the money to send me to Eton College because he had been there himself at the end of the First World War. He spoke of his time at Eton with unconvincing jollity and was evidently looking forward to a second, vicarious, innings there.

  My mother didn’t mind where I was educated. She did not have an ideology and simply wanted me to be happy, preferably without too much trouble. She never regarded education, which was full of awkward exams, as an obvious route to happiness. But probably such things were different for men.

  They certainly appeared different to my father who had the air of a man acting responsibly on my behalf – as, he implied, his own father should have acted for him. By the time I was sixteen, he judged the moment had come to take me to one side and explain the main purpose of my education – which was to retrieve the family fortunes that would otherwise descend on me, he revealed, in the form of serious debts. Eton was providing me with many valuable friendships that could catapult me, he believed, to success. It did not occur to me to ask why Eton had not provided him with such vaulting associations. He gave the impression of someone who had overshot success and landed somewhere else. In the event, I failed comprehensively in this romantic quest he had assigned me (my average incom
e between the mid-nineteen-sixties and mid-nineteen-seventies was to be £1,500 a year). I did not even know how the exotic family fortunes I was to rescue had originated or where they had gone. Was it all a mirage?

  Lack of money was very evident in my parents’ last years, when my father was living in a rundown flat in Surrey and my mother in a one-room apartment in London. I thought that the exercise of exploring happier years and travelling back to more prosperous times might bring them some release from their difficulties. From being their only child, the sole child from five marriages, I was to become their guardian and a barely-adequate protector. Having, as it were, commissioned them to write for me, I proposed paying them some commission money. After hesitating, my mother accepted the money with eager reluctance. She had always associated men with money, but understandably had not associated me with it, and was worried that I did not have enough. But times were improving for me, as if I were sitting on the opposite end of a seesaw from my descending parents. My Lytton Strachey had eventually been brought out as a paperback and after one very good year, when my Augustus John was published, I settled down at the end of the nineteen-seventies to annual net income of between four and five thousand pounds. I could afford to hand over a little money. Besides, I explained to my mother, she would not take my request seriously unless it was put on a business basis. Desperately needing the money, she gave me a kiss and took it.

  But my father would not take anything. He wanted to give money and receive praise: he found it almost impossible to receive money or give praise. He felt deeply humiliated by his poverty. ‘I certainly wouldn’t dream of allowing you to pay 1 cent for anything I write about the family,’ he notified me. I remember reading his letter with exasperation. He was so difficult to help. The truth was he felt embarrassed by my offer which, he wrote, ‘made me feel very ashamed of myself. I am not yet as down and out as you may imagine.’ Now, re-reading his letter after his death, an unexpected sadness spreads through me. It was true that he had been ‘down’ many times, ‘down’ but not quite ‘out’. Cursing the foul blows delivered on him by politicians, he would somehow pick himself up each time – just in time. But in his late sixties and early seventies, with only a State pension and a couple of hundred pounds from a mysterious ‘Holroyd Settlement’, though he would still speak with animation of things ‘turning up’, my father had in fact settled into involuntary retirement. The game was up. ‘I find that time is heavy on my hands,’ he had written to me. That was one of the reasons I had inflicted this homework on him. Nevertheless I emphasised that it was for my sake rather than his own that I was asking him to write an account. And perhaps there was more truth in this than I realised. For after my father and mother died in the nineteen-eighties I began to feel a need to fill the space they left with a story. Neither of them were in the front line of great historical events: their dramas are the dramas of ordinary lives, each one nevertheless extraordinary. From their accounts, from various photograph albums and a few clues in two or three boxes of miscellaneous odds and ends, I want to recreate the events that would give my own fragmented upbringing a context. Can I stir these few remnants and start a flame, an illumination? This book is not simply a search for facts, but for echoes and associations, signs and images, the recovery of a lost narrative and a sense of continuity: things I seem to miss and believe I never had.

  I had to distance myself from my parents while they were alive, not out of hostility to them, but from a natural urge to find my individual identity, my own route. ‘When a writer is born into a family,’ wrote Philip Roth, ‘the family is finished.’ Inhabiting their worlds as a child and then an adolescent, I felt invisible; after which I traded somewhat in invisibility as a biographer. But following my parents’ deaths, when they became invisible and I was seen to have attained my independence, my feelings began to change. I was drawn into the vacancy their deaths created, needing to trace my origins. It is an experience, I believe, that possesses many people in these circumstances: to ask questions when it is apparently too late for answers, and then be forced to discover answers of our own.

  The unexamined life, Saul Bellow reminds us, is meaningless. But the examined life, he adds, is full of dangers. I have found wonderful freedom in that maverick condition which can be described as meaningless: a freedom in not being tied to social contexts or engulfed in family chauvinism. My identity was shaped by what I wrote, though this identity was concealed behind the people I wrote about – concealed I think from others, and also from myself. But now I must go back and explore. My parents, my family scattered over time and place, have become my biographical subjects as I search for something of me in them, and them in me. For this is a vicarious autobiography I am writing, a chronicle with a personal subtext, charting my evolution into someone who would never have been recognised by myself when young.

  2

  With Virginia Woolf at Sheffield Place

  My father wrote with a ballpoint pen on blue Basildon Bond paper. I remember thinking that, his name being Basil, this was almost a pun – especially since he was largely playing the history don in this investigation, the don he occasionally felt he would like to have been. The handwriting, as always, is wonderfully clear: thirty lines to the page, three hundred words, as regular as a marching soldier – quite unlike my own unformed and erratic writing.

  He had probably prepared this fair copy from an earlier version. It stops suddenly in mid-sentence, at the foot of the thirty-eighth page, leaving him in his truncated schooldays during the early nineteen-twenties suffering from double pneumonia. But there are a couple of stray white pages, numbered 19 and 20, and a fragment of 21, that contain a variant text. They allude rather tantalisingly to ‘the only indiscretion’ of his own father, the ‘real start of our financial disasters’, and a ‘Holroyd Settlement’.

  There are signs that in his fair copy my father somewhat held back. Perhaps he remembered an attempt I had made to write about the family ten years earlier and the drama it caused. It had been an attempt at using my family to find a career of my own rather than following one of the uninviting professions they were urging on me.

  My father started his saga in its first version in the eighteenth century and moved fairly rapidly on to his parents – my grandparents at whose house in Berkshire I had passed much of my childhood and adolescence. But coming across a privately-printed history of the family prepared in 1879 by Thomas Holroyd, High Sheriff of Calcutta, for his son in Australia (later brought up to 1914 by Caroline Holroyd, Thomas Holroyd’s daughter, also for her brother who was by then a retired judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne, Sir Edward Dundas Holroyd), my father had been able eventually to reach back into the sixteenth century. That privately-printed history had been largely taken from Burke’s Colonial Gentry and Foss’s Lives of the Judges.

  My father believed that the ‘royd’ in Holroyd came from a Yorkshire word meaning stream. I do not know where he picked up this piece of learning. In the opinion of a Yorkshire local historian, Hilda Gledhill, ‘royd’ was actually a Norse word meaning clearing or place which had been introduced by the Vikings after landing at Durham in the eighth century and making their way south west into northern Wales. When surnames became more common, people were often called after the land where they lived, Holroyd being someone who occupied a hollow place or valley. My father enjoyed history, and had he come across a rare volume, John Lodge’s The Peerage of Ireland, published by James Moore in 1789, he might have liked to read that the Holroyd family is ‘of great antiquity in the West-Riding of the county of York, and derives its name from the hamlet or estate of Holroyd, or Howroyd, as it was pronounced, in Bark-Island six miles from Halifax, which they formerly possessed’. According to John Lodge, who provided a pedigree going back to the thirteenth century, the word Holroyd ‘signifies, when applied to land, such as was barren and uncultivated…The origin well suits the soil and situation of Holroyd… which joins to the mountainous country separating Lancaster from Yorkshir
e, called Blackstone-edge.’ It is spacious country with vast skies and steep valleys full of clinging mists; also deep green fields marked out by granite and millstone walls, and miles of brown windswept moors, dramatic and desolate, round which, in the teeth of the weather, the people of the South Pennons quarried out their lives.

  For several centuries Yorkshire seems to have been crammed with these Holroyds – butchers, clergymen, clothiers, farmers, landowners, soldiers, yeoman of all kinds. It was as well my father did not gain access to all this early material or he might never have reached the twentieth century at all.

  He began his story with two brothers, George and Isaac Holroyd, in the seventeenth century. From these brothers, he wrote, ‘our particular branch of the family is descended’. The elder brother was the great-great-grandfather of the first Earl of Sheffield, now remembered as the friend and patron of Edward Gibbon, or ‘Gibbons’ as my father rather endearingly called him. This Earl of Sheffield, John Baker Holroyd, is one of only two members of the family to have appeared in the original edition of Leslie Stephen’s and Sidney Lee’s Dictionary of National Biography. There his political career is described, his three marriages noted, and the price paid (£31,000) for the house and grounds at Sheffield Place in Sussex recorded (the purchase of which my father, who was having trouble with his central heating, ascribes to the climate of Sussex being more congenial than Yorkshire ‘for his family seat’). There too are listed Sheffield’s various Irish and English titles (Baron of Dunamore in the County of Meath, Viscount Pevensey etc.) and a bibliography presented of his observations, reports, and editing of Gibbon’s posthumous works. There is scarcely a hint of what Leslie Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf was to call, in her biographical pastiche Orlando, ‘that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests’.

  Virginia Woolf wanted to ‘revolutionize biography in a night’. She wanted to free the imagination of the biographer from that tedious parade of dates and battles, that dubious weight of notes, indexes and bibliographies which remove it from the common reader. She wanted to introduce riot and confusion, passion and humour. And then she also wanted to clear those forests of family trees planted from father to son in the colonising territory of male culture. Such dreams lie between the lines of an essay she wrote in 1937 called ‘Reflections at Sheffield Place’. At the end of this essay she follows not the male heirs (through the first Lord Sheffield’s grandson, an idiosyncratic patron of cricket who in 1891 took an English team, including W.G. Grace, over to Australia and founded the Sheffield Shield competition), but a daughter and then on to her granddaughter Kate Amberley who was the mother of Bertrand Russell. If you hop on to the right line it can take you almost anywhere.