Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  What I would have thanked him for, besides his teaching, was a letter he wrote to Purple Parr which was forwarded to my father. Though he lost it, he was impressed by the notion that I was rather a promising tortoise. It also had some influence on Parr himself, ‘I agree very much with Spanoghe’s letter,’ he wrote to my father.

  Michael has indeed a critical mind and its full value will probably not be appreciated for a long time. Indeed, it is in some ways a handicap at the moment. He is still very much an observer of life, even though he cannot detach himself completely. He sees more sides to a question than most schoolboys and is slow in decision because he genuinely wants to be right rather than merely expedient… He is neither a disciplinarian nor a rebel, and much of his work as Captain of the House must have seemed to him not right or wrong, but merely petty… He is not nearly (thank goodness!) at his peak yet: his honesty, determination, shrewdness and sensibility will come into their own when he has become, as inevitably he must, a little coarser-grained.

  Parr’s previous reports had emphasised rather less appealing aspects of what he called my ‘doubtful temperament’: my nervousness, indecision and egocentricity. He thought, though I cannot recognise this in myself, that I was swayed by superstition (‘he lacks robustness against omens!’), and told my father that I had a disbelief in ultimate success that I communicated to others – though this, I think, reflected Parr’s own disbelief in my success. But after reading Spanoghe’s letter, he gave a far more amiable interpretation of these qualities. ‘He has been exceptionally mild, but not thereby ineffective,’ Parr wrote. ‘He has been respected and liked by all classes… I could have wished that he had, in his Eton life, ventured further outside the house. But he kept to his own ploy and was in consequence little known. From those who have known him he has always earned golden opinions...’

  My mildness, and the ripples of popularity it briefly spread, can be accounted for by a decision I made to discontinue house beatings. I did not announce this as a new policy (not being a rebel), but simply beat no one. This was unusual in the early nineteen-fifties, but I got away with it because it became the practice almost before anyone noticed.

  In his last letter to my father about me, Purple Parr described himself as ‘a friend who has now known and liked him a long time’. But over five long years he had been unable to communicate this friendliness. His shyness, detachment and egocentricity (qualities I saw in him curiously similar to those he saw in me) put him beyond my reach, and beyond the reach of other boys.

  A year after I left Eton, in the autumn of 1954, I wrote to Purple Parr asking him for information that the Law Society needed relating to my registration as an articled clerk. In the course of my letter I mentioned that I was writing a book. ‘I imagine [it’s] a novel,’ he sighed. ‘...I should think at least one leaver every half writes (or at least begins) a novel in his first year away. You wd certainly be surprised at the number who have from my house.’

  This characteristic, slightly discouraging comment was to gain unexpected irony a few years later when David Benedictus published his succès de scandal, The Fourth of June. Benedictus, who had also been at Purple Parr’s, was three years younger than myself. Like me, he became Captain of the House and abolished beating. But by then Parr’s was once more becoming a brilliant athletic house. The dining-room glittered again with silver cups and shields, and the dull brown and mauve quarters of his house colours excited admiration on the playing fields. One consequence of this new climate was that David Benedictus had a more awkward time than I did, and was not permitted the same ‘mildness’. His novel, written partly in reaction to these difficulties, is a satire that shows up Eton as a totalitarian city state of snobbery and sadism. ‘It is inevitable in a book of this kind that some lonely person somewhere will imagine himself portrayed,’ he wrote in a careful preparatory note. ‘...care has been taken to avoid such portrayals.’ In the novel itself the word ‘lonely’ is applied to the calculating pusillanimous housemaster, Manningham, and, despite the care taken to convert him into an imaginary character, no one who reads the book and knew Parr can fail to recognise some borrowings. Parr himself read the book in 1962 and was obviously affected. It was adapted for the theatre and, around the time we all saw it in London’s West End, he suddenly died, leaving us with very ambiguous feelings of regret.

  15

  Legal and Military

  My first half-dozen years after leaving Eton were strikingly indecisive. They began with two minor operations. The first – to correct some complications in my right knee caused by squash-playing – was counted a success (though it actually masked an injury that led to more serious damage years later). I was given a general anaesthetic and stayed several days in hospital. It was the first time I had been in hospital since having my tonsils and adenoids out as a child, and I was taken aback by how much the experience disturbed me. In the ward men lay groaning, men lay dying. Between the rows of beds marched a starched army of nurses with glinting thermometers and watches, and among them moved a clattering rabble of cleaners and kitchen staff wheeling their trolleys. They looked exceedingly happy, often stopping and laughing among themselves, overcome with hilarity, as if unaware of the sounds of pain and fear all round them, as if they were somehow inhabiting a parallel world where these ranks of sick people were invisible. I could not believe what I was witnessing. I felt I was in hell. After my operation I told the ward sister that I wanted to discharge myself and complete my convalescence at home. But during those early years of the National Health Service, patients were not moved along like a fast-moving queue of ‘customers’ or treated as expensive ‘consumers’ to be ‘targeted’ with medicine; and the practice was to keep them in hospital until the doctors were confident they had fully recovered. The ward sister told me not to be so stupid and, as a precaution, hid my clothes. But I found them, dressed myself, hopped out into the night and took a taxi back to my bedroom at Wetherby Gardens where I felt much better.

  It was in this bedroom that I went through my other operation – a succession of primitive and painful clearings of the nasal sinuses by an ear, nose and throat specialist called Miss Wadge. She would stick a thin metal instrument right up my nose, above my eye, and pump sterilised water through it for an hour. After half-a-dozen visits, I was cured of sinusitis. Not long afterwards I suffered the first of a long, though not frequent, series of migraines in the very place where Miss Wadge had been needling me. Perhaps unfairly, I have always associated my migraine attacks with her operations.

  Around this time, and in the same bedroom one night, I had a frightening experience that enables me now to tell a miniature non-fiction ghost story.

  It is a wild night, reader, and a storm has blown up slashing the sky with rents of lightning, with tremendous bangs and rumbles of thunder. I am at the top of the house and my attic window suddenly opens. The wind frantically agitates the glass panes, the curtains streaming in, and the commotion of the storm outside wakes me. I hear the window shivering, see the curtains flapping, the rain driving in, and feel a strange coldness in the room. Perhaps I have woken from a nightmare. Certainly I feel odd and cannot tell for a few moments whether I am really awake or asleep. I take my arm out of the bed and stretch over to turn on the bedside light so that I can get up and close the window. The thunder roars and crashes. Then, as my hand reaches the light switch I feel another hand fixed upon it, a damp, cold, unattached, inexplicable, horrifying hand. My heart gives a thump, I force the terrible thing away and switch on the light, dreading what I will see. What I see is my other hand which has completely ‘gone to sleep’ and through which I can feel nothing. I am my own ghost.

  In later years I have had three or four similar experiences. An animal, perhaps a snake, maybe a rat, lands dramatically on my chest in the middle of the night a second after I have woken. I start up and fling the brute away, but it immediately lands back on me and I cannot get rid of the monster, whatever it is. What it is, of course, is my own absolu
tely senseless arm I am wrestling with in the dark. For some moments, without the circulation of life, it is a terrifying experience.

  Eton had gradually become the most secure of all my living places, and I missed the friends I had made there, Griffy Philipps, Michael MacLeod and a few others. I continued shuttling between Maidenhead and London, Sweden and France. I was travelling to France not with my father now, but my mother. We used to speak of L’Oiseau Bleu as our villa in the South of France, though it was little more than a stone shack with a glorious view of Monte Carlo from above the Grande Corniche. I hated it. I could do nothing with the view or anything else. In my opinion there was nothing else – nothing that interested me. I was scared of the frogs, lizards and scorpions that leapt and scuttled about my bedroom, and I disliked the wearisome business of carrying water each day from the village of La Turbie, a mile away. While my mother lay in the sun, I wandered around doing silly things like falling down a mountain, climbing a tree and making myself ill on unripe figs, or simply getting severe sunburn. I was an awful nuisance. Eventually my mother suggested that I invite my friend Griffy Philipps to join us. We met him at Ventimiglia railway station just over the Italian border, and he stayed three weeks. ‘Apart from some alarm about scorpions,’ he writes to me, ‘nothing very controversial happened.’ But it was much better doing nothing together than alone.

  On another occasion Kaja came with Birger Sandström who smoked a wonderfully long cigar and wore dazzling correspondent’s shoes. Edy brought his daughter Gay, and we all stayed in a hotel at Antibes. Gay was a couple of years older than I was, and something of a tomboy. Together, in great excitement, almost hysterics, we put on an excruciating ‘entertainment’ of music and recitations, through which everyone was politely obliged to sit.

  On 16 April 1954 I began a five-year term as an articled clerk. The solicitors to whom I was articled, T.W. Stuchbery & Son, had their offices at the corner of Park Street in Windsor. So I was still very close to Eton, though my new life was a world away.

  Messrs T.W. Stuchbery & Son had never entertained an articled clerk before and appeared to have little notion of what to do with me. I was technically articled to one of the senior partners, Ian Hezlett, a Falstaffian character of uncertain temper who had been a drinking companion of my father’s (signs of his beer-drinking could be detected after midday on his extravagantly frothing moustache). But I saw little of him in his grand office on the first floor after our initial encounter together with my father. ‘We’ll start him on tort,’ Hezlett announced. ‘Donoghue and Stevenson.’ My father laughed heartily, and I looked blank. Then I was sent up to a modest office under the attic where a thin, bent, sun-starved, middle-aged solicitor called Mr Owen worked, encircled by papers. An extra desk was moved into his office and I sat at it. I was also equipped with blotting-paper, pen, pencil and rubber. And that was it. All I did in the first weeks was to practise making tea and coffee. But gradually, over the months, my duties were extended. I released Mr Owen from some of his imprisoning papers, filing them in the shadowy attics crammed with documents tied in faded pink string, and covered with dust. Occasionally Mr Owen, who was a well-intentioned if unexciting man, would take me to the County Court in Windsor to sniff the legal atmosphere, and I would sit out the long days there. On one of my first visits, trying to keep awake during the afternoon, I unintentionally released from a large metal radiator a fountain of tepid water over some witnesses. I could not tell afterwards whether Mr Owen was amused or appalled, but I noticed that he began giving me increasingly odd jobs out of the office and would question me quite keenly when I got back as if hungry for some specks of entertainment. I was able to tell him how I had been shot at while attempting to serve a writ (the marksman taking aim through a caravan window as I approached, waving a white handkerchief, across a field), how I had accidentally been locked into a huge fridge among various carcasses which belonged to a litigious butcher who was, I felt, exaggerating the oven-like qualities of his cold storage. Apparently encouraged by my misadventures, Mr Owen saw to it that Stuchbery’s craziest clients, those in search of therapy rather than legal opinion, were sent up to me for consultation. I daresay that many country solicitors, before the widespread use of psychiatry, provided such services for those who could afford them. I remember one elderly woman who used to come in fairly regularly complaining of nudity among her neighbours. At twilight, she confided, and at even more revealing times, they would dance in the garden and were, she concluded from the noises she heard at night, tunnelling under her house. I made notes on my pink blotting pad, gave her some of my tea, and eventually prepared an invoice in mock-legal jargon which I think she appreciated.

  My worst offence occurred in London during a complicated divorce case. I had made a summary of the husband’s and wife’s letters to each other – something of an education for me – and was allowed by Mr Owen to attend the court hearing in London. But the case took an unexpected turn while Mr Owen was in the lavatory, and our Counsel, murmuring to the judge that he needed to take fresh instructions, turned to me. By the time Mr Owen returned, the case had been adjourned and the disgruntled parties found themselves still married.

  I did not know what I was doing. What I was meant to be doing was reading law under Ian Hezlett’s supervision for some of the time, and working in his legal practice for the rest of the time. In those Dickensian days, articled clerks were not paid salaries, but actually paid the solicitors to whom they were articled. This was not an obvious solution to our financial problems, though my father persuaded himself that it was an astute investment. At the beginning of my second year, acknowledging that I was receiving no training or tuition, but simply doing errands for Mr Owen, Ian Hezlett decided to pay me a modest wage. My father, ever the optimist, interpreted this as a promotion rather than surrender, and for a brief period allowed himself to feel almost happy at the way things were shaping.

  The only point of law that was explained to me at Stuchbery’s was one that involved a snail in a bottle of ginger beer. ‘Do you know Donoghue and Stevenson yet?’ Ian Hezlett called out to me one day on his way to the pub. Then it was Mr Owen’s turn. ‘May I recommend that you peruse the case of Donoghue versus Stevenson?’ he said seeing me gazing out morosely at the buses which went one way to Dedworth, the other to Gravesend. ‘How are you getting on, young chap?’ a visiting solicitor quizzed me. ‘Mastered Donoghue and Stevenson have you?’ I mastered nothing else, having received the impression that if I got the hang of this famous snail which had gone in its bottle all the way to the House of Lords to establish the manufacturer’s duty of care, then I would have cracked the legal code and all would be well.

  The most cheerful aspect of my legal career was that it deferred my two years’ National Service. But eventually I could endure the pointlessness and boredom no longer. I simply could not credit that people spent their lives shut up in such gloomy buildings, counting themselves lucky as they shuffled through old papers from Monday morning to Saturday lunchtime day after week after year, with only an annual fortnight’s holiday, until the long holiday of retirement and the permanent vacation of death. It seemed awful, but then I was intensely lonely, having lost touch with my companions from school and being unable as yet to replace them.

  There was at the office a girl who lived on a caravan site which I used to pass in the bus that took me each day from Maidenhead to Windsor and back. She was in her early twenties, slim, dark-haired and with glittering eyes that shone and flashed in my imagination at nights. Was it only in my imagination that she seemed to be making some signal that we might see each other outside the office, in the evenings or at weekends? I will never know. In those days it was difficult for a girl to take the initiative in a relationship, and I was handicapped by poverty and paralysed by shyness.

  From these legal experiences I was later able to add to my family’s foreboding of bankruptcy my own writer’s apprehension of libel. But the only law that genuinely interested me was criminal law,
and that is less an interest in law than in human nature. After eighteen months at Windsor, I braced myself for another confrontation with my father. ‘I am not angry because you don’t like the law,’ he wrote to me.

  I am angry because you are apparently prepared to chuck it up without an effort. The world is not an easy place & I don’t want you to miss the boat.

  I have met hundreds of men of my own age who are down & out in life and the story is always the same with slight variations. They are men of good education who because of indulgent parents never settled down to any job… Heaven knows, I don’t want you to hate your work, but I don’t want to see you a drifter – for I have seen only too often the mess they make of their lives.

  My father promised me that I would hate the army even more than the law. A legal qualification, he argued, would be my best insurance policy. ‘Your life must be more competitive than mine. If you pass your examinations you still have a big pull over the others because you were at a Public School, but not unless you can back it up with the necessary qualifications.’ He stressed the awkwardness of reneging on my articles, but if I was determined to chuck the law then it would be better, he told me, to join the army as a regular soldier rather than a national serviceman. ‘At 46 years of age you retire with a lump sum or pension.’ Then I could afford to write books. ‘You don’t know how hellish life can be if you get on the rocks,’ he warned me. My father was then, I calculated, forty-six. ‘Had I had a firm hand to guide me when I was young I would have been in a damn sight better position in life to-day.’ But, he concluded, if I would not continue with the law, not join the regular army, I must simply go my own way.