That winter I was made battalion skiing officer, told to take my platoon to Winterberg in the Harz Mountains, and teach them to ski. With white skis and white denims we trudged to the nursery slopes. After they had learned how to stem turn and stop I challenged them to a race; they poled down the hill as fast as they could while I skied back-wards, facing them, goading them. After a few days they could do Christianias, jump turns and were game for anything. At the end of each day on the slopes my platoon sergeant paraded them in three ranks, skis and poles held upright. He stamped smartly in the snow and asked permission to fall them out. ‘Yes please, sergeant,’ I said limpidly.
During the spring of 1956 we went to Senelager for more varied forms of battle training, including combined platoon and tank attacks, and all the way up to Brigade exercises in the countryside with the Scots Guards and Grenadiers. Whenever we marched anywhere as a platoon my men sang. The variety was wide, from ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ to ‘Oh, Sir Jasper, do not touch me she said, as she lay between the sheets with nothing on at all at all’. That was much better. At each repeat the remaining last word was omitted. At the penultimate stage, in perfect rhythm and the right beat in the bar they sang ‘Oh, Sir Jasper,’ then six strides in dead silence, and the final set of ‘Oh’ with seven silent strides. This puzzled the Germans we passed. So different from the Wehrmacht. We were fit and enjoying peacetime soldiering at its best.
Back at barracks there wasn’t really enough to keep the men occu-pied. The officers’ mess was not scintillating. Few of them read and there was little social life outside apart from shooting geese or duck with a few hospitable Germans. I started German lessons at the Berlitz school but as the German teacher’s only other language was Spanish, as a medium of instruction it was not worth the candle. So we played poker. Time wasting. Krefeld was uninspiring. Half an hour away was Düsseldorf where we enjoyed the restaurants and looking into the shops.
Brussels was two and a half hours’ drive away so four of us decided to go to a night club there, far enough away for indiscretion. After a day of seeing the sights and a good long dinner we parked outside a neon lit house which looked interesting. We asked a local about it. He shrugged, like a Frenchman, and said it always gave satisfaction. We went in, were immediately greeted by a uniformed concierge, given seats in a waiting room and served ‘champagne’; from the right kind of bottle but there the resemblance ended.
He announced the arrival of four beautiful young companions and brought in four more glasses and another bottle for them. In they traipsed; four rotund, part-worn, shop-soiled women whose breasts were only a burden. We were certainly not interested in them nor they in us. After an hour’s conversation, so as not to hurt their feelings, we thanked them for their company and prepared to leave. Perfect gentle-men. The bill was presented. It was enormous, for their ‘company’ and alleged champagne. Between the four of us we hadn’t enough money. Perfect idiots. I was the only one with traveller’s cheques.
At a quarter to midnight, leaving my three brother officers as hostages, I was escorted by two plump harridans either side of me in mink. We stood on the pavement. They hailed a taxi. The only place where cash was obtainable was the railway station. I will never forget the expression of the cashier as he looked up from his ledger at me, then saw my bodyguards. He blushed and looked down, pulled my trav-eller’s cheques towards him, examined my passport, and counted out the Belgian francs as the ladies clung to my elbows. He turned away as he handed everything back. I stuffed the empty cheque book, the cash and passport into my pockets, then they marched me back to the taxi to return to my chivalrous brother officers. As we collated our cash to pay them off a phrase ran through my mind for the first and, I’m happy to say, last time: ‘They took all our money.’
I joined Jenny and her parents for ten days’ summer holiday in St Raphael. In 1956 it had a line of pretty two-storeyed houses with gardens, overlooking a narrow coast road, the beach and the Mediter-ranean. The staff of our shabby little hotel were intimately French with their Marseille accent, slang and a dismissive shrug at anything that was not perfect. My pillow was stuffed with straw. Above the bed was a sign saying ‘C’est formellement défendu de pousser des cris d’extase’.
Wherever we walked the street photographers snapped away. Next day we would collect the pictures – at first of affection, shy in brief clothing, swimming things. A bikini, then proudly holding hands defiant with happiness, and eventually together touching from upper arms down to clenched fingers. We swam, water-skied, played tennis, but spent most of the time sprawled on the beach, silent, with an occa-sional sigh. By the end of the week we were engaged. I gave her a gold ring with a facia, the plan being to have our initials engraved: TJ, or even JT which could stand for ‘je t’aime’. She gave me a LIP watch and we looked forward to a long engagement.
After National Service I went up to Christ Church, Oxford, reading philosophy, politics and economics. My main tutors were the philoso-pher Oscar Wood, the historian Robert Blake and the renowned econo-mist Roy Harrod. I had a room in Peckwater Quad, looking out at the great Library, pitch black and magnificent with soot before it was restored to its original honey-coloured sandstone. I shared it with a tall Old Wykehamist, Nicholas Mills. We both decided to row for the House in the Long Distance Eights. That led to the first time I had been a proper member of a team. At football, with my ridiculous feet, I had always been useless, but on the river, after being mildy successful at Eton but only as a sculler, I now became part of the ultimate team sport: in a racing eight.
Rather than go direct to Strasbourg for Christmas I made a detour via Krefeld. I had heard of the bond between officers and men and wanted to find out about it. At Krefeld station I telephoned the Adjutant. He said that I was welcome to stay in the mess, but that evening was the Guardsmen’s Ball in the gym. He put me through to the Regimental Sergeant Major. His measured gruff voice said: ‘Wonderful to hear from you, sir, welcome back to the family.’
After dining with the officers, me in a suit, they in their blues, we wandered across the parade ground to the gymnasium, which poured forth thunderous rock ’n roll music. Inside was teeming with other ranks in battledress and almost as many local girls. I was soon surrounded by men from my platoon, offering me whisky, beer, anything, and wanting to know all about life at Oxford as a student. We reminisced about Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace, marching through the streets of London to guard the Bank of England, and the many and varied patrols, attack and defence exer-cises in the fields, forests and hills of Germany. My faith in human nature was reconfirmed.
In Strasbourg all was well. Jenny and Marie-Rose said that it was Jules’s birthday and that, for the sake of drollery they were pretending to have forgotten. He went round with a long face all that day, unaware of the mighty preparations for dinner. When all was revealed as a surprise and the champagne was opened he poured it down. Like a greedy child he tucked into the meat and vegetables. He even followed the meal with a big cigar which gave him a choking fit. Then he had a stomach-ache. He lay down and it got much worse. He insisted that a doctor be called. He said the pain had spread to his heart and that he was dying. He held Jenny’s hand. She was worried about his continual coughing because his feeble eyes showed such strain.
The doctor arrived.
Jules said it was his heart.
The doctor took off his overcoat, jacket, and in his shirt-sleeves loos-ened Jules’s trousers and unbuttoned his shirt. He gently felt the little man’s chest and stomach. He said it was a simple case of over-eating.
‘C’est le coeur,’ insisted Jules. ‘Je sais.’
The doctor assured him that it was nothing to do with the heart, ‘which is there’, he prodded with his finger. ‘While the stomach goes from here to there.’
He opened his medicine bag and took out some suppositories. ‘Take one of these when I’ve gone.’
I helped the doctor on with his overcoat and he said a formal farewell. Meanwhile Jenn
y had cut out one of the suppositories and was trimming it with nail scissors. Jules took it from her, put his hand behind his back and in a trice inserted it, buttoned up and sighed.
‘C’est le coeur,’ he said again. ‘Je sais.’ He closed his eyes and drifted into a peroration, stating that Jenny was the only one who loved him, how Marie-Rose never had. That had to be accepted.
I turned to Marie-Rose sympathetically. She shrugged, ‘He says that every time he has a birthday. Yes. That has to be accepted. I am his wife. I let him take me from time to time. I wish he weren’t so clumsy.’
A hell of a birthday.
We went to Grindelwald and my usual skiing friends were at the Hotel Bahnhoff, including Clement and the avuncular Teddy Clarke. They had been there when I first met Jenny and were enchanted by her. She had then been chaperoned by a couple from the haute bourgoisieof Strasbourg. With her foster-parents it was different. They didn’t fit anywhere. They were not skiers and not even walkers. They spent most of the day in bed watching television, complaining how exhausted they were. They made no effort to join my friends. Jenny and I had to sit apart from the others with her two parents, as if in Coventry. My mother had written to ask Teddy about them. He wrote back that the foster-mother was the ultimate in petite bourgoisieand there was noth-ing to say about the foster-father except that he was a nonentity who just looked hideous, while Jenny was divine
Larry wrote to Marie-Rose a spoof letter. In retrospect I realised how funny it was but at the time I was mortified. It began, ‘I am apprised by my son of the delightful circumstances concerning your daughter.’ It continued with many a camp twist of Edwardian affectation. Marie-Rose put together an excellent and witty reply in classical French, assuring him of her depth of gratitude for his most gracious letter which had given her so much pleasure as she did enjoy laughing. She matched point for every phoney-sophisticated point. I felt almost proud of her.
In spring she and Jenny came to London to stay with me and my mother in St John’s Wood. That was a disaster. Larry came over to meet them. Marie-Rose took him into the music room for a private conver-sation. Some time later they reappeared. She went over to Jenny on the window seat and Larry took me to one side saying he wished he was better at French. He told me that Marie-Rose kept insisting that Jenny stole in order to make me happy. I coaxed the actual words out of him. He had muddled ‘prier’ for ‘prendre’. Jenny spent hours praying for me. ‘That sounds even worse’ he said.
Only a few days later it hit me that Jenny and I really weren’t meant for each other. ‘Nous partons demain,’ her foster-mother said, and they did. The farewell was deadening.
That August was my twenty-first birthday. Vivien was overseas so my mother and I went together to Notley. Larry and I played vicarage tennis. In the evening we were joined by nine or ten of their mutual friends, including George and Mercia, Glen Byam Shaw and Angela from Stratford-upon-Avon, and others I knew and liked. Larry gave a very touching speech to my mother’s good health. I wondered if they would still have been married had Vivien not appeared, love her though I did. Without her he would never have bought Notley. Her earnings were huge and her style more than matched that glorious place. She and Larry did seem so right together and in the eyes of the world. Strange having my mother there. She looked ill at ease and I felt very lost with-out Jenny. We had agreed not to write to each other. It was over. It was a long time before I really loved again.
Back to Oxford. For my second year I had taken the rooms Anthony Eden had had on the top floor of the Old Library. It was above the fifteenth-century cloisters and faced south, to the ruthlessly Victorian-gothic Meadow Buildings. Vivien had lent me some paintings, my mother a baroque mirror, and my upright piano fitted in nicely. I had the place to myself and could practise in perfect freedom.
For my twenty-first birthday present grandmother Eva had paid for a sculling boat to be made for me by Sims of Putney. In the New Year I stroked the Christ Church torpid for the second time. Sculling went well and I won the New College Sculls easily, in the final beating a heavyweight Oxford blue by 17 seconds.
I was always short of money and only dined in Hall. One day I treated myself to buying a long-playing record of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto which I had never heard, and a pot of blue hyacinths. The sun streamed into my room. The music’s knotted muscularity and passion stirred me profoundly. With the glorious smell of the hyacinths and after the final mighty cadence of a rising arpeggio ending the first move-ment I felt a surge of happiness, the first since Jenny.
I went all out for training, pumping iron to build up my back and shoulder muscles. At Eton my only significant race had been the final of the junior sculls when I was easily beaten by one John Mead, a big man whose thigh muscles protruded dauntingly at each stroke. He was now at Merton College. We drew each other in the first round of the Oxford Royal Regatta Challenge sculls, over a short course of about half a mile. At the halfway point we were level and I wondered whether I would ever be any good. No one could have trained harder.
As we came to the boathouses I put everything I had into a sudden sprint and took fully a length off him. He now could not see me. Merci-lessly he pulled back closer and closer with every stroke. He sprinted but I held him off, just, to win by half a length. Had the course been fifty yards longer he would have won. The final was easy. By the boathouses, way ahead of my opponent, I heard the commentator saying: ‘That’s the way, Larry’s boy, give the girls a thrill.’ Bloody man. [ 41 ] But later when I was handed the trophy, of silver sculls etched in arabesques on a bed of Oxford blue velvet, one of the teenage onlook-ers said ‘Well done Larry’s boy,’ and that I rather liked.
Every Saturday night after dining in Hall I cycled up to Little Claren-don Street where my piano teacher the composer Bryan Kelly lived with his boyfriend John Webster, the organist at University College. They shared a flat above a butcher’s shop. John was a friend of Mary Wilson, the poetess, married to Harold who was a lecturer at Univ as well as being leader of the Labour Opposition in Parliament. He used to join us for the sickliest of all drinks, gin and orange, very bad for my rowing training but it was only on Saturdays, and so did the great Wystan Auden, Regius Professor of Poetry. We discussed everything from poetry to the entire reassembling of civilisation, entirely in keeping with the university’s ethos.
Round about midnight we would hear the butcher getting to work in the basement, hacking his carcases. This was a sign for Wystan to take off his patent leather shoes, tie the laces behind his neck, peel off his silk socks and trudge back all the way to Christ Church in bare feet. He would be back at work by six in the morning. Hence perhaps the deep lines on his face. Maurice Bowra said they made him look like a wedding cake left out in the rain overnight. I took my mother there one evening after we had dined at the Randolph Hotel where she was stay-ing. She shone brilliantly with Harold and Wystan, one of the best evenings of all.
Every term I and others were invited to dine by Tom Boase, President of Magdalen College, in his private rooms. He was later to become University Vice-Chancellor. Once he had been Larry and Vivien’s dinner guest at Notley, he told me, and as the butler was helping him with his coat, he heard Larry saying: ‘He’s a don at Oxford, but he’s quite all right.’ A great comfort, he said. The unfulfilled love of his life was Peggy Ashcroft, who had in 1935 been Juliet to Larry’s Romeo. Once again Maurice Bowra’s repute as an Oxford bitch was well earned: ‘Tom Boase is a man of inestimable public qualities, but alas, no private parts.’
I lost the first round of the University Sculls to the President of the University Boat Club, Ronnie Howard, by two seconds over the full mile and a quarter course. He was so surprised he bought me an ice cream afterwards. Next day he gave a very close race to John Mead, who broke the long-standing record time by a full six seconds.
I wanted to win a university event. David Edwards, son of the rowing sage Jumbo Edwards, agreed to have a crack with me at the University Double Sculls. Mead stroked
the other boat with a not very distinguished partner behind him. We should have won easily. Unfortu-nately something happened to the boat we were used to. There was no time to adjust the outriggers of its replacement. They were far too low for me, making it extremely difficult to get my hands away at the end of each stroke, and by the end of the race they caused abrasions on my wrists. We lost. I was furious.
This was too much. I took David to a pub and we each sunk three pints of Worthington E. Back at Christ Church I pointed out that the Cathedral was under scaffolding. With my interest in medieval archi-tecture I had been up it several times. I insisted that David join me.
The ladders and tread boards were firm under our feet as we climbed. On top of the cathedral, to the east, and a distance away, were the stone mullions rising above the far end of the roof. There was a long flat lead encasement about a foot wide ahead of us, with the roof slop-ing steeply down either side. I accurately trod along that way. God sometimes looks after the drunk. We reached the end. We hauled ourselves up the West Front and stood triumphantly, surrounded by the most glorious views of the whole of Oxford; every tower and spire, the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, all the way round to Magdalen Tower and Christ Church Meadows.
Years later when he was married David named his son ‘Tarquin’.
Four
My letter-writing to Quentin Keynes, describing the Army patrols I had led in Germany, had the desired result of him asking me to join his African expedition that summer. 1958 was the centenary of Dr Livingstone’s Zambezi journey. We, with a young American called Dave Coughlin, were going to take a Union Castle liner to Cape Town and retrace the great man. Quentin was thirty-four, six foot two, fair-haired, with an aquiline nose and blue eyes, made the more piercing by his slight stoop. He had been a maverick since the age of sixteen when he climbed the roof of the family house in Hampstead, and refused to come down until his parents agreed that he didn’t have to go back to boarding school. He turned away from the usual paths of high achievers. He sought out remote parts of Africa, became an explorer, amateur filmmaker, a safari leader. Every winter he made his money by lecturing and showing his films, which he narrated viva voce, to schools and various societies in Britain. He also drove all across America doing the same. I persuaded him at the Earls Court Motor Show to buy his first Jensen sports car. Every summer he went on safari with a posse of young men; no guides, no tents and certainly no guns. From his father he inherited a passion for collect-ing historical manuscripts and books, mainly about Africa. That was his genius. Fifty years later, after his death, his collection was auctioned by Sotheby’s for a total of more than three million pounds, paying for the school fees of many young relations. He had a philosophy which was attractive even if impractical without inherited wealth: if you really want to do something strongly enough, then life will allow you to do it.
So Who's Your Mother Page 6