So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  Our letters often seem to answer each other as if they touched on the way. Until you really start doing what you have decided to do there will be nothing else to talk about. We are both just swaying gently about like two men just a bit too drunk to have the sense to go to bed. You, I think at the moment seem to be luxuriating at a prospect, standing on a bridge, staring down at your little craft and wondering how and if you will win a race. And I am saying to you with that immaculate decorum for which I am famous ‘get into the fucking thing and row’ …

  You have my dearly loving wishes, as always and forever, your fucking old DAD.

  To my mother he had written:

  I had a letter from T last week and just between ourselves I’m a bit nonplussed how to answer it. The darling gets seriouser and seriouser, and short of suggesting that he goes to join Schweister in Africa I can’t for the life of me think of any livelihood that would content him. ‘I want to save mankind … without any religion’ he says. I really do feel a bit anxious. I don’t want to write too realis-tically for fear of making him think he is talking to a philistine and drying him up from me … You are so sweet in telling me how you worked at getting him and me closer together, but now I must confess I feel a bit pariah-like.

  It did take me longer than most to find a livelihood that combined the three essentials: that it paid enough, that I was good at it, and liked it.

  Eight

  Returning home after nineteen months in South-East Asia I stayed with my mother at 31 Queen’s Grove. The garden was lovely, the delphini-ums and wisteria at their peak. She was happier.

  Every day from nine until one, and from two to seven, I was incar-cerated in my room. I sat at a handsome desk with a view over the pond in the front garden, Queen’s Grove beyond, and revised my book on the people I had known the previous nineteen months. Writing did not come naturally to me. In Djakarta I had met an Australian journalist representing the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His name was Kenneth Henderson. He offered me a job writing news for the Swiss Shortwave Service in Bern, where he was going to set up an interna-tional news department. That was to start at the end of September and I looked forward to it. Meanwhile I hammered away at my typewriter, wanting to finish my book first.

  My friends in England all had jobs, mainly in the City. Some were fascinated but some frustrated by their distance from whatever it was they were trading, broking or financing. They could not take seriously that I was writing a book and working longer hours than most of them. An Etonian and Christ Church friend, David Gladstone, invited me to his wedding. The bride was April Brunner, a debutante of my 1955 vintage, her parents and mine old friends. The ceremony was in Christ Church Cathedral and the reception was at the Brunners’ early eigh-teenth century Wotton House, a few miles from Notley. I was improp-erly dressed, the only man not in morning clothes. It struck me that I was becoming an outsider.

  Larry came to Queen’s Grove to dine. He was full of life, happy in his second year of marriage to Joan Plowright. They had bought a Regency house, 4, Royal Crescent in Brighton, overlooking the Channel, deco-rated in Georgian style. It had a small garden at the back, and in London they had a flat they kept quiet about, in Roebuck House, Victoria. Larry used to learn his lines on the Brighton Belle train.

  Over dinner both he and my mother said my letters from South-East Asia had been a terrible disappointment. All I had written had been descriptions: nothing that indicated conflicts between individual people, the sine qua non of drama, fiction, comedy, or any real story development. Nothing like the wondrous stories of Somerset Maugham in The Casuarina Tree. Well, I had read them; my main reaction, although admiring the story-telling, was that they must have damaged the reputations of the English managers and colonial servants working there. They did agree that I had found a number of interesting adventures to pursue and I told them of my determination to finish my book about those.

  In the evenings in London I looked up the people who had given me introductions and told them about my travels. One of them was an American journalist who worked for Associated Press. He and his wife had me for drinks, and also a beautiful Malayan Chinese actress, Yu Ling, who had a part in the play The World of Suzie Wong, which was in rehearsal. We became very fond of each other. She was getting over a relationship with a fashion photographer. She was an old friend of Malcolm MacDonald. He had been High Commissioner for South-East Asia, and masterminded the top military and civilian appointments to defeat Communism in the Malayan Emergency.

  I stayed with Vivien in Tickerage Mill, her newly bought country house near Uckfield in Sussex, in a valley with a big pond flowing into the River Uck. She had brought Mr Cook, the gardener, and his wife from Notley and housed them in a nearby cottage, so the grounds looked their best. Her paintings and plush furnishings fitted the modest-sized rooms and she seemed happy to have settled down with Jack Merivale, Gladys Cooper’s stepson, a man of wonderful good looks, consideration and refinement but little energy and barely any talent on stage. He would go to bed soon after dinner while she and I sat up with our brandies all hours of the night, tirelessly, conversation meandering. We were as close as ever.

  September came. I finished my book before going to Switzerland and gave it to Peter Watt, a literary agent the novelist Pamela Frankau had introduced me to. Yu Ling and I parted sweetly and continued to write letters to each other. Her plan had been to see the play Suzie Wong through its tour and into London, then return to Malaya where she had a long-standing relationship of some kind, I didn’t inquire too much, with a talented Malay about whom Malcolm expressed reservations.

  The Swiss News Department offices were near Zeitglockentum in Old Bern. It had telex machines, for Reuters, United Press International, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Deutschland Press Agentür. Whenever any of them, or indeed all of them, had anything to report they would hammer away rowdily. My boss was Ken Henderson, the Aus-tralian journalist I met in Djakarta. He had worked on the Swiss Short-wave ‘Programme Side’ in previous years. He had done very well to convince the Swiss of their need to have an international news service. The country had a fine reputation, still no representation at the UN, and no international voice. My sub-editor was another Aussie, Norman Ben-nel, who had damaged his nose as a boxer, and an American, Eddie Isen-son. The secretary was a 22-year-old Swiss girl called Elspeth.

  I became a sort of machine which could read a thousand words of boring French, grasp the import, refine the lead sentence and summarise the story in crystal-clear English. Eddie did the same with German. Norm wrote and sub-edited and Ken approved. We had American medical students to read our ten-minute bulletins. To start with we only broadcast domestic Swiss news – the opposite of exciting: cantonal politics, conferences in Geneva, pollution in the lake. Every day for practice we also wrote dummy international news bulletins. When we got better these were submitted to the Swiss Federal Cabinet. They gained enough confidence in the News Department to let us become the International Voice of Switzerland. Not bad for just four of us, and a triumph for Ken Henderson. Our bulletins were translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Indonesian.

  We moved offices into a brand new building on the outskirts of the city. From my desk the view was of the whole range of the Bernese Ober-land, the Munch, Jungfrau and the Eiger: Grindelwald’s mountains. This was close to my flat in Kirchenveldt. We finished at 7.15 when the news-reader went down to the studio to broadcast our ten-minute bulletin, and the translators went to work for their own news programmes.

  I used to dine alone in a pleasant restaurant, the Burgenzeil; my only chance for reading books. I had a letter from Peter Watt saying that my book ‘Eye of the Day’ was readable, interesting and certainly publish-able. I immediately felt I could do no wrong and lent it to Eddie Isenson to read. He was not all that nice about it but there was something irre-sistible about his personality, his very hooked nose, eyes which almost completely disappeared when he laughed, and his and his wife Bev’s kn
owledge of photography. He said my book was ‘tweeny’. It was not readable; interesting, yes, in parts, but certainly not publishable. Now by that time I had been news-writing in the simplest and most easily assimilated English, to assist the speed of translation, with the kind of rhythm our English newsreaders could best use for emphasis. In some-thing of a sulk I took my typescript to bed with me and re-read it. I felt I was descending at increasing speed down an elevator shaft without end. I could see exactly how right he was, though I did not come round to agreeing it was ‘tweeny’ until some years later, because at the time that was what I was: ‘tweeny’.

  I started to rewrite it slowly, in longhand. After dinner I would leave the restaurant and be home at my desk by nine and write until the local church bell struck midnight. Straight to bed, without even finishing the sentence. Up at 6.30, shower while the coffee heated and egg boiled on my electric ring, then back to the book at 7 a.m., becoming immediately immersed until 8.45, ready for the walk to work. I have never felt more productive, writing my book before and after the busy day in the News Department. By that time it was winter so I spent weekends on the skiing slopes.

  Larry and Joan had a son, Richard. Larry gave me an air ticket to fly over for the christening. He had become Artistic Director of the Chich-ester Festival Theatre, under construction, so I drove my mother down to Brighton and then Larry drove us and Joan to Chichester Cathedral. Larry had made Joan change her hat, which miffed her, so I cheered them up with a limerick:

  A beautiful woman from Chichester

  Made all the Saints in their niches err;

  One morning at Matins

  The heave of her satins

  Made the Bishop of Chichester’s breeches stir.

  The Dean officiated in a bright cope and stole designed by the painter John Piper. It was held together with an orange tile across his chest. As soon as Richard was in his arms the tiny hands grasped and unhooked the tile, which was fastened up again only just in time to avoid catastrophe. I was a godfather. When on behalf of the baby the oath had to be given to eschew the world, the flesh and the devil, Richard belted out a fabulous squawk of resentment.

  Back in Switzerland in the New Year I went to see my godfather Noël Coward in Les Avants, sur Montreux. This is the letter I wrote afterwards:

  7 January 62

  Darling Mummy,

  I have just returned from my weekend with Godfather Noël, exhilarated, flattered and a trifle perplexed. He met me down at Montreux station just after lunch on Saturday, his face chapped, shiny with grease he had used to counteract the dryness, his ears swollen. We went to a chemist shop to buy something and I noticed how his hands shook as he took the small change off the counter.

  We had dinner with Adrienne Allen and Bill Whitney. Bill talked I thought quite interestingly, but on the way home, Noëlie, Graham Payn [his boyfriend], Gladys Calthrop [the theatre costume designer], and Cole Lesley [his general factotum who wrote far the best biography], all agreed that Bill was a terrible bore and wasn’t it marvellous of Adrienne to be so good with him. I couldn’t help wondering whether I would have found Bill less interesting than I did if I had not become absorbed by Bern.

  This morning I went up to N’s room for an after-breakfast tête-à-tête with him still in bed. He talked a great deal about what had prompted my voyage to the Philippines and why I had stuck it out. He overwhelmed me with the unexpectedness of all he said when he talked to me. He ascribed tremendous importance to me trying to learn Russian on the boat going to Manila. Understood completely my affection for farmers as well as princes.

  He made me feel that I have talent. I told him about reading my manuscript and how unhappy I felt, the letter from A P Watt saying it was good, when I came to realise it was bad. He said so many things about his admiration for you. But most wonderful of all was his saying how marvellous it was to see that you were so obviously my best friend.

  I seem to be putting as many superlatives in this letter as he does in his speech. Never mind. He thought I was well balanced, vulnerable and incapable of being cruel. He insisted that if I had talent as a writer I would be absorbed, fascinated, never bored, always busy for the rest of my life.

  I told him I hated looking at people from the point of view of a craftsman, the writer, unattached and incorrigibly aware of how I would deal with so and so in prose. He told me not to worry. He closed his eyes, wrinkled up his nose in a puglike grin, eyes pressed watery tight and said, oh my dear boy, if you can write … you will be violently happy, desperately unhappy, constantly, all your life. And love it.

  He said that if Willy Maugham had been nicer he would have been great. But he lacked compassion, was so cynical. I said what about Of Human Bondage– that was compassion all right. He said the compassion was there for the wrong reason – self-pity.

  We talked of plays. Osborne’s, Wesker’s, and of his dis-attach-ment from them. He seemed to have far more awareness of the stories within them – how stale, or bad, or good etc. He has seen so much.

  I told him of my affair with Yu Ling, how it had started when she was hurt and fed up with her boyfriend, how happy we had been those few months together in England, and what loving letters she had been writing, even now, after she had gone back to the same boyfriend feel-ing refreshed and ready for love again. He described to me what a beau-tiful story that could make.

  I had sent him my rewrite of the first few chapters of my book. He had a number of technical points on grammar. Never use the word ‘very’ unless it is very useful. He said that for the purpose of my own survival my journey to South-East Asia was the best possible thing to have done, striking out on my own. ‘How silly of Larry not to see the importance of that. Without it you would have felt in his shadow, and now you don’t. How wise of Jill.’ He thought my writing tended to be too serious.

  He wrote in his diary:

  Monday 8 January 1962

  It has been a lovely holiday and we’ve painted and lounged – the snow was only really good on one day – and done crossword puzzles and made some very good jokes. Altogether one of the nicest Christmases I have known for years. Yesterday Kit [the American actress Catherine Cornell] and Nancy Hamilton drove over for lunch with Brian and Eleanor Ahern. Tarquin, my godson, was here so we were quite a crowd. Kit was wonderfully good, sad underneath but gay on top. [Her husband Guthrie McClintock had recently died.]

  Tarquin is really a bright and sweet boy. Jill rather surprisingly, I think, has been a wonderful mother to him and he quite genuinely adores her. Larry as a father figure has not come off quite so well. Tarquin is vulnerable and, I think, fairly tough. He recently spent twenty-one months in Indonesia living, in acute discomfort, with the natives and working out theories about how the West can ultimately understand the East. Personally I think this unlikely, but in any case he seems to be very dedicated and has written a book on the subject, which he is now rewriting, as well as working nine hours a day doing a news broadcast service in Bern. I do hope that he has a genuine talent for writing and that his book is good.

  After the winter of wonderful skiing the hills burst into spring and beckoned for picnics. I met a Swiss actress, Linda Geiser, who had the looks of Greta Garbo. She did not ski. Her profession forbad it lest she hurt herself. She was wonderfully well read and made me feel so alive. Desirable, but I felt beyond my reach. Her English was slightly accented, her High German perfect but she said she was frustrated by the lack of variety available for acting in that language. She had decided to change to the English language, and managed to get a small part in Sidney Lumet’s film The Stockbroker, with Rod Steiger. As a stage actress she still toured in German productions in Zurich or Germany.

  Later that summer I met an Austro-Hungarian, Alice, who had been married to an Indian and divorced; a strong healthy girl with eyes as blue as the temple tops of Isfahan, and very fair hair. She lived in Geneva. We sailed on the lake, picnicked on the Mount Salève, and the following winter went skiing everywhere for the weekend.
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  In October 1962 came the Cuba Crisis. The News Department now had one more writer. The crisis was so overwhelming that we thought it was not good enough for our United States evening transmission merely to be a repeat of our European transmission which went out at 7.30 p.m. our time. The four of us took it in turns to get up at midnight and make our way to the newsroom to bring the lead story up to date. When it was my turn I could hear the alarm bells of the telex machines smashing out at every hit of their typing heads. Inside the office there were yards of paper all over the floor. I tore them off, stuffed them away and replenished the feeds with new rolls of paper so that they would not run out when most needed. Bang bang bang, ding ding ding on all sides, panic in English, French and German. Facts, alleged facts, inter-pretation, contradictions, emergencies, everything flying around. I wondered how much contradictory information, from every source in the world, was getting through to the White House and the Kremlin where ultimate responsibility lay.

  Then at about 1 a.m. there was a despatch on UPI in English: an unconfirmed report that the Soviet destroyers, carrying nuclear warheads for the missiles they had installed in Cuba, had stopped five hundred miles from the coast. Those Soviet missiles, if launched from so close to Washington would make a devastating hit before any defen-sive missiles could intercept them. At first President Kennedy had warned Khrushchev that if his destroyers did not stop at least a thou-sand miles from Cuba, then the United States would unleash nuclear Armageddon on the Soviet Union itself, believing that any riposte from that huge distance would be almostcontained by its own anti-ballistic missile missiles. One did wonder, in those days of nuclear confronta-tion, while the whole world waited in horror, whether anyone was working on an anti-anti-ballistic missile missile.

  In a rare instance of British diplomacy having a great effect on the Administration, we learned later that our Ambassador, David Ormsby-Gore, a close friend of Kennedy, advised the President to reduce the flash zone, from one thousand to five hundred miles from Havana. The logic behind this was that it would give the Soviets slightly more than a day of further thinking time, without altering the strategic position. The world knew none of this. So for a full twenty-four hours, from the moment the destroyers breached the one-thousand-mile perimeter, Armageddon was awaited globally. Never has the entirety of mankind been held in such agonising abeyance.