Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  7

  A Triumph and Disaster

  Ulla was pleased to be getting away from Stockholm. She had an adventurous spirit and she loved travel. Nor did she mind leaving her mother. It was not that she and Kaja didn’t love each other, but they needed to be independent. Living together, they were like two dancers each treading on the other’s feet. Ulla’s feelings for Kaja were a world away from anything Yolande had ever felt for Adeline, yet both daughters had their difficulties. Adeline liked to stop Yolande from going to parties in London. But when Ulla said she was going out to a party in Stockholm, Kaja would dress up and go along too. And what a power dresser she was! The rustle of her dress before she entered a room and the lingering perfume in the air after she made her exit were potent spells that lodged in many imaginations. She had such a sharp eye too and was still so strikingly smart that her presence grew immensely oppressive to Ulla. The trouble was that Kaja, then in her early forties, seemed so terribly old to her daughter, yet she simply refused to behave like an older person. She was delighted when people took the two of them for sisters. Because she preserved such a strict manner at home, it was only gradually that Ulla realised what was going on. Though her mother kept a single gentleman admirer, the distinguished-looking Birger Sandström, famous for his cravats, who escorted her through the high places of society, she also kept company at other times and in lower places with all sorts of amusing bohemian artists. One of them painted her in a fur coat, earrings and lace bodice (I have the painting in London). It was also rumoured that Picasso – or was it Picabia or even one of the Pissarros – had become infatuated with one of her feet while she was travelling abroad. It was usually Picasso in these stories and part of Kaja’s foot was said to appear in his Guernica. Her own collection of pictures, near masterpieces all, hung like trophies on the walls of her apartment, the names of the painters – ‘Fragobard’, ‘Valminc’, a rare ‘Edouard Monet’ – echoing discordantly their famous reverberations (she left me a small ‘Verner’ and what looks like an unusual ‘Whatho’!). The distraught Birger Sandström found himself obliged to fire off many agitated telegrams.

  ‘What a mother! What a daughter!’ exclaimed one of Ulla’s schoolfriends. Stockholm seemed too small to hold them both. So Ulla was not unhappy to be escaping. She would be particularly pleased to miss that one day a week when her father was allowed access to her. She didn’t mind being taken to the opera by him and felt proud of his musical knowledge (though she was embarrassed when he started humming – and besides, opera was not the sort of music she really liked). But what she hated were the evenings he came to dine with her and Kaja. There was absolutely no conversation at all, simply an icy silence and then dreadful bickering.

  Ulla had been to France but never to England before. Her English was not bad and under the pressure of events would quickly get much better. Of course she felt a little apprehensive, but on the whole she was excited. It was the summer of 1934, she was seventeen, and she wanted to have fun.

  On board the Suecia as it set off from Göteborg, Ulla sat at the Captain’s table – Kaja had arranged that. Everyone dressed for dinner, there was a formal toast, and a dignified atmosphere prevailed – at least it would have done had there not been so much noise from one of the other tables, in particular from one persistent raucous English voice. ‘I was annoyed and kept turning round,’ my mother remembered. On the second evening a man swayed up to her table and with exaggerated correctness requested the Captain’s permission to ask Ulla for a dance. The Captain assenting, she found herself waltzing with the ghastly-voiced Englishman. He explained that he had been smoking too many Gauloises, and then went on jovially talking. ‘He could talk anybody into anything,’ she later wrote. He told her he had recently been in Germany and then gone to Sweden to meet important people in Kosta Glass. He spoke brilliantly of the beauties of Lalique and his own rich future in glass. Before they reached Tilbury, he had talked her into giving him her address and telephone number. And also a promise to see him in London. This man was to be my father.

  *

  Ulla’s first experience of England was a shock. She was living at Beckenham in Kent with a Mrs Malmburg who received pupils for English language tuition. No. 48 Coper’s Cope Road (a name which struck her as incredible – it came from a handsome eighteenth-century house with quoins and a pediment on giant pilasters at the end of the road) was partly a guesthouse, partly a small school. The regime was deliberately English and included kippers for breakfast at 7.30 a.m. which made my mother sick. She was pleased to get an invitation from the man on the boat, asking her to lunch with him at the Grill Room of the Hyde Park Hotel. But Mrs Malmburg felt anxious – until Basil spoke to her on the telephone. By the end of their conversation, she was convinced that Ulla could hardly be in more distinguished company than this Old Etonian director of Lalique.

  So Ulla went up to London. She was worried over this first journey by train and bus to the capital. The Hyde Park Hotel, which flew the Swedish flag whenever King Gustav stayed there, was only two minutes’ walk from the elegant Breves showrooms in Basil Street with their ‘Chinese’ wallpaper and permanent display of Lalique. At the Grill Room, Basil ordered Ulla what she took to be a lemonade but was actually Jimmy the barman’s speciality, a Gin Fizz. After the first shock, she found it delicious and had to be driven home by car. But she had sobered up by the time she reached Beckenham, and Mrs Malmburg, impressed by her description of the Hyde Park Hotel, was happy to let her go on seeing Basil. Ulla was allowed to spend weekends at Maidenhead which, to Mrs Malmburg, sounded a pretty safe and proper place. Here Ulla met the amiable if rather distant Fraser, the baffling Adeline (a small figure with tall hair), Yolande dashing everywhere in her short tennis skirts, and Kenneth encircled by his aristocratic friends. Thatcher, the family chauffeur, had retired and his place was taken by Frederick who would drive Fraser, and sometimes his sons and their friends, up to London on weekdays. Ulla used to wonder what he did there until it was time to drive back again. She was always wondering things like that.

  Ulla’s English had improved, though she still found the English Js awkward and would speak of waving a ‘Union Yak at the You-billie’. Basil taught her some slang and several naughty words, and he and his friends started calling her Sue or Suzie instead of Ulla which rather stuck in their throats. She was becoming quite anglicised, and picking up extra English culture from her visits to Brocket – the weird offerings of hot-water bottles, the ritual of early-morning tea, the ceremonious walks with the dogs, and the strange procedures when everyone sat down to dinner.

  Brocket was then in the last phase of its glory. The lease had come to an end in 1933 but Fraser, still hoping for good things, renewed it year by year. ‘It was a lovely brick house,’ my mother remembered, ‘covered with green ivy, a drive and two gates.’ It had been designed by a young architect called Clifton Davy who became well-known for his domestic work along the Thames Valley. The upper part of the building was built of solid oak half-timbering with herring-bone brickwork, and the house itself divided from Boyn Hill Avenue by an ornamental brick wall. Above the heavy oak front door two quotations had been cut into the stone: ‘Through This Wide Opening Gate None Come Too Early None Return Too Late’. And, more conventionally: ‘Welcome The Coming Speed The Parting Guest’.

  My mother was obviously impressed by Brocket. The large hall with its light oak panelling, its beamed and rafted ceiling, was a perfect place for parties. The French doors opened on to a veranda some six feet above the tennis court and, when the evenings were warm and the lamps lit, there was no better place for sitting out between dances. It is not difficult to imagine how exciting these dances and parties were for my mother now that she was not under the watchful eye of Kaja.

  Ulla wrote regularly to Kaja who was delighted with her daughter’s progress into British society. These Holroyds with whom she was spending so much time appeared to be a wealthy and well-appointed English family, with some Irish and perhaps Scotti
sh ancestry as well as an Anglo-Indian chapter in their history. Basil himself, curiously christened after a herb, recommended himself as an Old Etonian and a Cambridge man whose central names (De Courcy Fraser) had to Kaja’s ear a reassuringly rare Anglo-Saxon elevation. Kaja was pleased that her daughter was enjoying herself. It was all most satisfactory.

  But events were to move with a speed and unorthodoxy that took Kaja aback. ‘You must have been conceived,’ my mother hazarded, ‘on the canebacked sofa in the drawing-room at Brocket’ – which rather puts paid to her speculations over my conception at the Hyde Park or Basil Street hotels. Perhaps it was that same sofa on which Norah Palmer Holroyd had lain, her pretty hair spread out, before her final journey into France in 1913; and the sofa on which the enormous frame of Tom White expired after breaking his golf club in the early nineteen-twenties. Dr Johnson once boasted that he could write the life of a broomstick, and it would need him, or Virginia Woolf, to tell the common reader the story of a sofa.

  My father was twenty-seven on 20 October 1934 and my mother celebrated her eighteenth birthday on 20 November which was probably also the date of my conception (but since I was apparently born almost a month off schedule it is difficult to tell). The two of them were then secretly married at the Registrar’s Office at Bromley, not far from Beckenham on 15 December 1934. One of the witnesses was the taxi-driver who drove them there and then took them up to London through the rain (it was pelting down that day according to the Meteorological Office). They spent their honeymoon at the Basil Street Hotel, which had some good Lalique glass in its art deco interior (it was only a few yards from the Breves showrooms). Then they went off to spend Christmas in Stockholm where, rather belatedly, my father asked Kaja for permission to marry her daughter. Kaja answered that she wanted them to have a decent period of engagement, which was awkward – no one thought of consulting Ulla’s father Karl whom Basil never met.

  To set things off correctly Kaja took Ulla to be fitted for her white wedding-dress, at which stage I can make out the word ‘Calamity!’ in my mother’s handwriting, dramatically underlined as she underlined other decisive words such as ‘pregnant!’ and ‘married!’ There was no hiding the pregnancy from Kaja’s sharp eyes. Ulla was too sick for that; after which there was no point in hiding the marriage. Had they intended to stage a second marriage in Sweden? I believe they had. It would have been a good joke: and everything still had the air of a joke. But Basil now admitted to the marriage – and his wife’s pregnancy. It was certainly not what Kaja had had in mind: a Registrar’s Office in Bromley. For a time, a rather short time, she looked severely about her, then relented. ‘I think Kaja was glad to see me “happily settled” as she thought,’ my mother wrote, ‘since she herself was busy with poor old Birger Sandström.’

  The white Swedish wedding was called off and the married couple sailed back to England in January 1935. After Basil had brought his parents up to date, they settled into 91 Drayton Gardens, the cottage in Fulham to which Fraser had retired after leaving Agnes May. My mother’s labour pains came on that August in the Fulham Forum, the cinema at the end of the road. She was taken to the London Clinic and Kaja arrived from Sweden just in time for my birth at 4.20 p.m. on 27 August. My father, who had been playing golf, was late – which may account for him assigning me a birthday two days later.

  Kaja stayed on in England for the autumn and came to visit us again in 1936. The regime at Drayton Gardens seems to have been pretty comfortable. There was a Danish housekeeper called Vera who looked after my parents; and a nanny who looked after me – ‘she fell in love with the milkman & had to have all her teeth out (nothing to do with the milk)’, my mother explained. There were also two small town dogs, Snaps and Popples (which sounds like a breakfast cereal or perhaps a circus act), a tabby cat that discovered things and was called Christopher Columbus (he had been bought from the grocer for one penny by my mother who believed that it was ‘bad luck not to pay for a cat’). We also owned two goldfish, Dalgleish and Pullen, named after a couple of architects my father knew.

  All this was agreeable enough, but what my Swedish grandmother liked most were her visits to Brocket. English society might be incomprehensible, but its incomprehensibility was impressive. What for example could she have made of the family Arms and Crests and Latin mottos – those Demi-Griffins Wings Endorsed, those Roses Gules and Pierced Mullets in Saltire that occupied a more prominent position at Brocket than the lavatory of my father’s flat in Surrey that was to be their hiding place years later? Whatever she made of them, I feel sure she was glad they were there. Only they should not have been there. What Kaja could not have known, since no one else knew, was that none of these Holroyds, not Fraser nor his father Charles, nor even their eminent forebear Sir George Sowley Holroyd, nor the first Earl of Sheffield himself, had established through the correct registers and pedigrees, the right to ancestral Arms by inheritance. So this parade of exotic Conquerfoils, that Fess Dancetty Argent, those many Escallopes Gules, diamonds and lozenges, the very Pierced Mullets themselves were all assumed without proper authority.

  Never mind. Basil took Kaja round the house. Off the hall was a large drawing-room with two silent grand pianos where Adeline held her bridge parties. There was also a cosier ‘morningroom’ and a rather dark formal dining-room, its refectory table lined with straight-backed chairs. This led on to an Edwardian conservatory full of ferns and garden furniture. Down some stairs by the side of the dining-room were the kitchen quarters – a pantry and spacious kitchen off which stood the cool larder and a scullery where vegetables from the garden were prepared. Basil introduced Kaja to the staff in the Servants’ Hall, but did not take her of course to their rooms which were on the top floor and reached by the back stairs. Kaja’s own room when she stayed at Brocket had once been Kenneth’s, and contained a magnificent Hepplewhite four-poster bed. It was on the first floor, as were Fraser’s and Adeline’s bedroom and their two dressing-rooms (one of which, with its separate door on to the passage, had by now become Fraser’s bedroom). At the south west corner of the house, overlooking the garden, was Yolande’s bedroom which no one else entered. There were three other guest bedrooms and along one side of the corridor two bathrooms, as well as a spare room that had once been the children’s nursery.

  Basil ended his tour where they had come in downstairs, at the entrance hall with its medley of sticks and umbrellas, and its two lifesize figures of a black man and black woman that had fascinated him as a child but that somewhat perplexed Kaja. Yet it was the quality of her perplexity that was important. Indeed she exaggerated the grandness of life at Brocket and when offered a pot of Russian caviar at lunch, served by the parlourmaid on a silver salver and with a silver spoon, she took the whole pot and had to be corrected by her daughter in Swedish.

  Another foreign visitor to Brocket and to Drayton Gardens was Rudi. He had first come over as a trainee at Breves Lalique for a few months in 1934. The following year the Nazis introduced conscription and he had to submit himself for a medical examination. Standing stark naked before a panel of senior officers, he was congratulated on his excellent health and asked in what arm of the services he would prefer to serve. Surprised, he replied that, as a Jew, he was surely ineligible for any service, but was told by the presiding Colonel that the new ‘Reichswehr’ (German army) needed strong ‘Burschen’ (members of the student fraternity) like him, and that he should not believe all he read in the newspapers. It was this incident that finally decided him to seek his future abroad, much to the chagrin of his father and his ‘Aryan’ partner who were both convinced that the Nazi nightmare would soon be over.

  By 1935 the United Kingdom immigration laws had been tightened. No one could arrive and simply look for a job. Only prominent people – capitalists who brought money to invest – were welcomed and given a home. Rudi’s grandfather had recently died leaving him £750 (equivalent to approximately £25,000 at the end of the century). This he proposed putting into a new company my fa
ther was starting called Holroyd (Glassware and Lighting) Ltd. His money, my father promised, would guarantee Rudi a junior partnership. But there was a difficulty. It was impossible to transfer money out of Germany legally, and illegal currency smuggling was now a capital offence.

  It was then my father came up with one of his ideas. In the rather kitsch range of table-lamps made by the Stensch factory in Berlin were some with a stem cast in the shape of a gnarled tree with a variety of animals lurking in its shade. Among this odd zoo was a herd of elephants, the largest of which was so big that the front and back parts had to be cast separately. What my father was proposing sounded like one of his innocently dangerous pranks which were becoming less innocent and more dangerous as the decade advanced. Why shouldn’t one of these huge elephants convey Rudi’s inheritance abroad? Basil ordered six of the table-lamps for his company, and suggested that the loaded elephant should be marked with a scratch on one of its heels. So this was agreed. When the lamps were ready for dispatch, Rudi’s father and his partner sent the nightwatchman out on an errand, concealed the fortune inside two of the raw elephant halves, soldered the parts together and put the whole elephant in a patina bath. Then they scratched the prearranged code and substituted this elephant for one of the six already waiting export.

  The consignment arrived at London and, instead of waiting for customs clearance and dispatch to the warehouse in Fulham, Rudi went to the docks at my father’s suggestion and took possession of the elephant with the damaged heel. ‘I was very nervous and in the taxi riding back tried to break the beast open,’ Rudi remembered. ‘I made such a racket that the Jewish cabbie asked what the hell I was up to. I revealed the secret to my co-religionist, whereupon he took a big spanner and somewhere on the Commercial Road, smashed the elephant to bits, revealing the hoard. Cheers all round: my future was secure.’