Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  *

  Thurnell, I now recall, was the name my mother told me never to mention within the hearing of my father. Hazlehurst’s reaction to her affaire with him must have been the conventional one. This was the climate of opinion in which my father made his decision to take me back to Maidenhead and, since she would not go there herself, leave his twenty-six-year-old adulterous wife to fend for herself in wartime England.

  What Hazlehurst wrote was intended to comfort Yolande. His own opinion surely supported hers. How well she had behaved, and how badly Ulla was behaving, in this war crisis. But the hypothetical reference to his own wife, so impersonally thrown into the argument, may not have brought Yolande much comfort after all. Who is to say what was in her mind when introducing this scandalous family business into their correspondence. But Hazlehurst is preoccupied with Hitler and no longer feels so intimately involved with Holroyd affairs. ‘It is none of my business,’ he writes, ‘so we will forget it.’ The rest of his letter is full of news which Yolande could hear any day on the radio or read in the papers or, if she ever went to such places, pick up in the pubs. It is the stuff to give the troops (Hitler ‘has got his hands full with Russia… the terrific pounding the RAF are giving the hun cities in the Ruhr must be having its effect’, etc.).

  There is one more letter in the series. It is difficult to date, being without an envelope, incomplete (ten from what appear to have been fourteen pages) and scribbled in pencil on the writing paper of the Cheshire Regiment. Hazlehurst has been ill with shingles and ‘crops of boils in the most awkward places’. This is due to his not having ‘relaxed literally for years’ and to ‘never [having] had any leave’. When he does get leave, ‘I propose to go & have a fish or something to give me a complete change.’ Without the ‘Yolande darling’ on the missing first page and the regular ‘All my love’ on the last, the letter reads as if it were written to another man.

  Hazlehurst did eventually get one of his wishes. After Mussolini fell from power in the summer of 1943, he was sent out to Italy. Less than three years after declaring war on Britain, Italy then declared war on Germany, and Hazlehurst found himself in a friendly country. He must have written a letter to Yolande, but she did not keep it. ‘She learnt one morning that her fiancé had married an Italian woman of 20 (he was nearly fifty),’ my father indignantly explained.

  The consequences of this – Yolande’s endless running with the dogs across the fields, her inability to tolerate us as we sat about gulping down our meals, the barricading of the house against visitors, the fiery outbursts at her mother, the putting away of her records in the garage, her retirement into her bedroom – I could see every day at Norhurst. But I could not interpret it and did not try until I came to write A Dog’s Life. ‘Poor Yolande!’ my mother exclaimed in her account. My father’s reaction was one of outrage. ‘She was reduced to unpaid nurse to three old people,’ he wrote to me after reading part of my manuscript in 1968. ‘Not much need to ask you to remember what sort of life she leads now – you see it often enough.’

  What had gone wrong? And why had her brothers done so little apparently to help her? Perhaps that is the question of a single child, and brothers cannot be used in this way. Besides, it is impossible to tell from this packet of letters whether Yolande really loved Hazel or whether he was the only man she really knew and somehow not quite the right man. Whatever the reason for this sad end to their affaire, her mistake, whether from excessive loyalty or a failure of nerve, was to have gone on living with her family. She may well have protected her father from his wife, but he could not protect her from the consequences of living with them both. And the consequences were awful.

  12

  Scaitcliffe Revisited

  Scaitcliffe had not changed very much since my father’s time there. The school had grown from forty to fifty-five boys between the two world wars, and one of the classrooms had been enlarged. A squash court and rugby fives court which had been built were ‘in constant use’, the prospectus assured parents. An extra playing field had been bought from a farmer, extending the grounds to some twenty acres. Otherwise the red-brick, late-Victorian pile stood with its chapel in Crown land as before. My father would also have been able to recognise some of the names – Riley-Smith, Cornwall-Jones – of boys whose families, like himself, were continuing to send their sons to Scaitcliffe. So he was doing the customary thing. Yet after reading the account he wrote towards the end of his life of the hell he endured there, I cannot help being surprised. Why did he do it? One answer is that Scaitcliffe was the only preparatory school he knew, and there was little opportunity during those war years of getting to know other schools. But I don’t think that he would have wanted to act differently whatever the circumstances. Though he spoke to me kindly about homesickness, I had no idea he had been miserable himself at Scaitcliffe. Quite the contrary. The only clue lay in a book he gave me, F. Anstey’s Vice Versa (which I later saw filmed by Peter Ustinov as A Lesson to Fathers). In this story the father, Mr Bultitude, who is much given to praising his time at school as the happiest days of his life, is magically obliged to change places with his son and re-experience the tortures of his boarding school. I enjoyed this novel, but I did not pick up the signal my father was sending me.

  He was an optimist, my father. He wanted to believe that things were getting better and all was for the best. He had suffered because of his brother, but I had no big brother overshadowing me. Besides, it was only when he was approaching the fragility of his second childhood that the miseries of these early years came back to him. In his late thirties, during these war years, the ups and downs of school life did not seem such a big business.

  Yet my father was eager for me to do well at school. He had never really come to terms with missing so much through illness when a boy. Success had been blazing away somewhere else while he languished in Switzerland. When had he ever been applauded or thumped admiringly on the back? He won no silver cups, wore no coloured badges. He breasted no tapes ahead of others, saved no penalties, never scored a century. Everything he had missed now seemed to return and take hold of his imagination. I was to be his second chance, play another innings for him, take the field as his substitute. I ran, I jumped, batted, bowled and kicked for him – and looking through the school records I find I represented him not badly. At the age of twelve I made the winning long and high jumps (13ft 2in and 4ft 4in); I won the Senior Challenge Cup and a cup for fielding; I became vice-captain of the football and the cricket teams.

  By far the oddest of my accomplishments was as opening batsman for the cricket eleven. The family money had dwindled so drastically by then that my father and grandfather could no longer afford to buy all the equipment I needed. So they were delighted when I came in from the garage at Norhurst one day carrying my Uncle Kenneth’s bat and pads. He had put them to good use at Cambridge in the nineteen-twenties, but would not be needing them now, we all agreed, in his Romanian prisoner-of-war camp. So I could have them. We would write and tell him they were in use again, and he would be pleased. Many years later I wrote an essay called ‘Not Cricket’ in praise of this bat and pads.

  The pads were deeply yellow and reached almost to my shoulders. I peeped out from them unafraid. The bat was a mature instrument, well-bound and fully-seasoned, giving out a deep note when struck, like a groan. I admired that bat – but I could not lift it. I was ten or twelve; the bat was more than a quarter-of-a-century old… I would drag it to the crease and then, as it were, leave it there. As I took guard there occurred a total eclipse of the stumps. The bowler had not even a bail to aim at… We stood there, my uncle’s bat and I, keeping our end up, while runs flowed and wickets fell at the other end. I had a good eye and would watch the balls swinging my way with great keenness, making lightning decisions as to what shots I could play. But I never played them except in my imagination.

  The Scaitcliffe School Notes record that, like my grandfather at Uppingham, ‘Holroyd was the soundest and most correct [batsma
n], but a slow scorer.’ That was a polite understatement. Occasionally, over the seasons, a ball would glance off the edge of my uncle’s bat and flutter through the slips bringing me a run. But it had to go almost to the boundary to gain me time to reach the other end in those pads. What the score sheets do not reveal is that, despite my meagre totals, and though going in first, I was often out last doing something desperate with the bat, handling it as if it were a Scottish caber. I was the nightwatchman who watched the day, and my perfect total was nought not out. If I was not popular with the other side, I was scarcely a hero with my own. My batting partners were obliged to score most of their runs in boundaries, and those lower in the batting order seldom got much of an innings. Once, when stranded between wickets with my vast anchor of a bat, I was run out, I could not tell which team uttered the loudest cheer.

  Nought not out summed up my achievements at this age. There seemed to hang about me an undefined air of promise that prevented me from doing anything at all. I seldom spoke first and never took an initiative. To attract attention, it seemed to me, was to ask for trouble. I strove for invisibility. What I liked most, because I had never experienced it before, was ‘joining in’ whatever was going on. I liked the Sunday walks in our blue suits through beechnuts, conkers and sweet chestnuts (which we were allowed to take back and toast for tea) to the ‘Copper Horse’, the equestrian statue of George III that looked towards Windsor Castle down an avenue of trees three miles in length called ‘the Long Walk’. Sometimes we walked to the Duke of Cumberland’s Obelisk at Smith’s Lawn, heads bent, on the alert for pieces of shrapnel. I loved also the epic games of ‘Convoy’ in the wilder reaches of Windsor Great Park, hiding in the heather or behind trees, then veering off between ‘destroyers’, or ‘submarines’, ‘minesweepers’ and ‘battleships’ as we risked finding out who was what and then tried to remember as we raced for headquarters. On our way back, walking in crocodile past the flaking white façade of Fort Belvedere, we would glance around for items of the Crown Jewels which Edward VIII had thrown over the wall and into the park, we believed, when told he had to abdicate. I remember too the excitement of climbing into one of the massive hearse-like Daimlers that took our teams to play matches against other schools: Sunningdale and St Pirens; Heatherdown and Earlywood, each with their tribal rallying from the edge of the playing fields. I even enjoyed lining up with all the others for Nurse Minima to spoon us our ‘Virol’ or ‘Radio Malt’ each morning; also lifting up my voice in the chapel and losing part of myself in the collective singing: Decani versus Cantoris.

  My moments of happiness often came from these conspiracies of self-forgetfulness. I also made at Scaitcliffe my first two friendships. One was with a boy called John Mein with whom I often paired off during our Sunday walks. One Sunday afternoon he came back with me to Norhurst and I showed him the walking-stick gun with which I had almost shot my grandmother. As a precaution, it had been hidden on the top of a tall dresser in the dining-room, but unfortunately my grandfather had not unloaded it, and we unintentionally shot a cartridge past the parrot and into the ceiling. No one found out, and after the shock we had to hurry into the garden and burst into laughter. What we laughed about at other times I no longer know, but we were always laughing and the joy of that laughter I remember vividly. Sometimes we laughed ourselves into sheer helplessness. ‘I’ll give you such a smite, Holroyd!’ one of the masters cried out in despair after John Mein and I had spread our staggering laughter through the complete cast of the school play, a historical drama with us attired as General Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm at Quebec. It was a passion, this laughter, that released me from innumerable apprehensions. At another time when I went to stay at his mother’s house in Sussex, we almost drowned ourselves in a boat so uncontrollable was our condition. John Mein remembers taking me ferreting that week and ‘you didn’t like me wringing the rabbits’ necks – but you always were a tender soul!’ I have no memory of this, though I recognise my squeamishness. For me John Mein was a poet of the ludicrous and an imaginative storyteller, who lost his shyness in comedy and stories, and taught me how to do the same.

  Another wonderful storyteller was my friend Christopher Capron. He would fill Wellington dormitory after lights-out with glowing tales of adventure and mystery. I could never have enough of these stories. ‘What happened next?’ I would demand, and he would give another spin to the plot. One by one the other boys, Bowman (the clever one who was bullied), Drummond (who played the piano), Molins (who was always being beaten), Palumbo (who was our sports star) and Stirling (who had a secret society with a language no one understood) fell asleep. But I was always awake at the end, clamouring for more.

  I knew John Mein and Christopher Capron only four years of my life, but I count them both as lifelong friends, one the Muse of Comedy, the other a Keeper of Stories, because their liberating influences have lasted all my life.

  Scaitcliffe was probably no worse than other preparatory schools of the time, and in one respect it was certainly better. In the grounds, between the playing fields, lay an excellent kitchen garden from which, for much of the year, we had fresh fruit and vegetables to add to our war diet of dried eggs and baked beans, our porridge and chocolate tart. Other schools loved coming to play us at cricket and football because they could wolf down such scrumptious teas. This was largely due to Mildred Vickers, a believer in milk and, fortunately, in cream. She studied our diet sheets, and prescribed Haliborange to supplement our rations.

  Ronald Vickers, the formidable headmaster of my father’s time, had died eighteen months before I arrived. In the attic at the top of a pitch-pine staircase lay the first Mrs Vickers. Or so we believed. Mr Vickers was now up there too, of course, encased in lead, awaiting arrival of his second beloved wife. After lights-out we dared one another to climb the stairs to this attic and look through the keyhole. Chetwynd minor said that when he did so the handle of the door had turned and a voice whispered ‘Come in!’

  Ronald Vickers’s twin sons, whom my father had seen when a boy being wheeled across the lawn in their double-pram, were abroad fighting in the war, and the acting headmaster was Denis Owen.

  Denis Owen was a remarkable man. As a teenager, he had won an exhibition to Oxford but was unable to go there because his family had no money. In 1927 he had been recruited by Ronald Vickers to take the place of Edgar Ransome, that twenty-stone ‘coarse old man’ my father had so hated. All the distinction of the school during my time there derived from Denis Owen. His career was spent teaching the sons of well-off families who did go on to university. He was a small, wiry, tough character with a hooked nose, dark hair, a grim expression and demonic energy. He coached us brilliantly at cricket and football; he ran a debating society, played the organ in chapel and gave the sermons, took shooting lessons, taught Latin, French and English, worked himself and us, indoors and outdoors, round the clock. Though boys from other schools envied us our delicious teas, they were glad not to have our strict and strenuous regime. We were woken at seven o’clock by the clashing of a bell handled by one of the gardeners, and after washing at the bowls of decanted water in the dormitories and hurriedly pulling on our grey shirts and shorts, our ties and sweaters, we proceeded in line to our first service in the chapel where the biblical figure of Denis Owen was already at work on the organ. Then, following a ten-minute scripture lesson, we went in to breakfast. The rest of the day was crowded with Latin gender rhymes, fielding practice, multiplication tables, gym, English grammar and spelling, cross-country runs, the recital of dates in history, and appalling plunges into the open-air swimming pool (an uninviting arrangement of concrete and corrugated iron in which we nakedly splashed, watched by the keen eye of Mr Bailey who also took us for drill). Most of the teaching was unmemorable, but Miss Stanton’s hesitant French lessons, and the spitting and shaking of Mr Perry’s mathematics reinforced by something known as ‘the Perry Punch’ (a clenched fist, one finger angled, delivered to a painful spot on the upper arm) stay in my
mind as being peculiarly terrible. Mr Perry was an irritable old man, stinking of tobacco, whose large yellowing moustache concealed a bullet hole from the First World War which was, in our opinion, his one distinction. Worst of all were the piano lessons in a tiny room called ‘the sardine tin’. When I struck a wrong note I was immediately stopped, my finger taken and placed on the correct note, and then forced up and down on it, again and again, jarring the sound through my body. I gave up piano lessons, saving my father three guineas a term, but have regretted it for the rest of my life. Perhaps the war was responsible for such bad teaching. Perhaps it was the same everywhere.

  But Denis Owen commanded our respect if not our affection. I think we all recognised that he was somehow special, though we also thought he was extremely frightening. ‘He certainly petrified me,’ John Mein remembered. The beat of his footsteps through the corridors of the school, especially at night, started a wave of pounding fear ahead of him, and we would hold our breath until the sound receded. Maybe I feared him more than most, for I was ridiculously sensitive. I can still blush when I remember the eruption of laughter in class when I pronounced surgery as sugary, called a Quaker a Quacker, came out even more disastrously with an ‘earthquack’, and gave the Thames two phonetic syllables. Mr Owen appeared unaware of my sensitivity, however, until awareness was forced on him by a sensational episode.