So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  Reading the unconfirmed report from UPI, all alone in that chaotic room, that the Soviet destroyers had stopped, before the world knew, was astounding. The story was immediately denied by Agence France-Presse, in French. I could sense their fury at being scooped, but it was only to be expected that America would scoop whatever the news was in its own back yard. So I lead the updated story for the 3 a.m. newscast with the unconfirmed reports – now several of them. It meant that Khrushchev had blinked. Ken Henderson arrived just in time to take my updated bulletin, go down to the sound studio and read it live in English for the United States and Canada. Next day the newspapers had the story and the world could breathe again.

  I went home for a week’s holiday in London that summer. I had met Joan Plowright, a new Lady O., for dinner with Larry at Overton’s, St James’s, the year before. Very awkward it was. Later I saw her in their new Brighton home, happy and delighted, and the funniest raconteur. Her pauses and grunts, her amazing eyes and her timing were as bril-liant as Frankie Howerd’s.

  My Swiss actress friend Linda joined me in Queen’s Grove. On the way to Chichester we had lunch with Vivien and Jack Merivale at Tick-erage Mill. It was especially lively because John Gielgud joined us. He held forth at a speed even greater than Noël Coward’s, tearing into every topic with erudition and tactlessness. If political correctness had yet existed he would have sheared his way through it. He was often unintentionally funny, as when, at the end of an accelerating tirade against certain young actors, the only words we could understand were his last ones ‘ … and speak so badly’. So we all said: ‘What?’ and burst out laughing.

  We drove on to Chichester to see the opening play directed by Larry: The Chances, a lightweight and highly physical romp with Joan, Keith Michell, John Neville and others. Chichester’s octagonal splendour stood in a sloping grass field. There was a festive air outside as everyone wandered round in the evening sunshine, drinks and cigarettes in hand, mutual recognition on all sides. Frequently I introduced Linda to theatre people, all very much taken by her intelligence and beauty, more like Greta Garbo by the minute.

  A recorded announcement amplified Larry’s voice at his most ingra-tiating, saying that the play would commence (awful word) in five minutes and ladies and gentlemen were invited to take their seats. Then followed the most mellifluous orchestral music by Handel. We almost danced into the stalls to see the theatre-in-the-round, no proscenium arch, the stage surrounded on three sides by the stalls, and above it and all around was a gallery with balustrades.

  Linda was most impressed by the English actors’ light comedy tech-niques, and especially the way the young actors moved, their physical-ity. We adored Joan in the sauciest role of a lifetime, funny, sexy, enticing and one would never have guessed she had given birth to Richard so recently. Larry and Joan had us for dinner at a nearby restaurant. The atmosphere between them was delirious, fun, fulfilled, and with an almost youthful innocence in their stolen glances. This was different from Vivien who always looked up to him, which he adored. Joan looked at him as an equal, from another generation, yes, and from another tribe but he had fallen in love with the change. I think that was the start of the happiest few years of his life. His marital and paternal status was more legitimate than ever before.

  The reviews for The Chances were disappointing, for the second play The Broken Heart even worse. He said that the last offering, Uncle Vanya, would also be slaughtered by the critics; but knew in his heart of hearts that it would be great.

  Linda and I drove home to Queen’s Grove. Next day I took her to Henley Royal Regatta. Quite by chance her cotton dress was perfectly chosen. It was criss-cross-patterned in black, grey and white squares like the colours of the Christ Church Boat Club. I was wearing the tie. We went to the Stewards Enclosure with appropriate entry medals flap-ping about and joined Gladys Cooper for lunch at Barn Elms, now Dame Gladys, halfway down the regatta course. Linda marvelled at some of the hats. ‘Where,’ she asked, ‘where in Switzerland can you wear hats like that?’

  That night, after bathing and changing, I took her to see The School for Scandal, cast with Daniel Massey and his sister Anna, lifelong friends. The play was a wonderful production and we went round afterwards to see Anna in her dressing room. Linda tried too hard, as usual, and said that Gielgud had been right about something, a silly name drop. We returned to Switzerland our separate ways.

  Later that month I sent my rewritten draft to Noëlie and went to spend the weekend with him. The actors Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were there, George and Bethina Saunders, Catherine Cornell and Nancy Hamilton her stout friend. The one I liked the best was Bethina, married to such a hard-faced and imposing George Saunders, so frustrated with not being as important in real life as the roles he played that he cheated. He had milked government funds for non-exis-tent entrepreneurial farms and narrowly escaped prosecution. She adored his sense of humour, which must have taken some doing. She told me that one day she went home from the doctor in tears, and told George she had advanced cancer in both breasts. She was going to have to have them both cut off. She buried her head in his chest, clutched him and shuddered with horrified tears. His response somehow made her laugh. ‘Who wants them?’

  Breakfast with the Master next day was worrying. He had been examined in hospital for his arteries. The one going into his right leg had a blockage and was shrunken. He might have to have it chopped up and replaced by a plastic tube. He was on the wagon and taking medicine to see if he could get away without an operation. Yet he was highly cheerful and the night before, wagon or no, was far and away the most brilliant of that shining company. Well … he had read my book and considered it much improved, very much improved. Then he, the Master of the English language in all its variety and vicissitudes, his vocabulary of unparalleled riches, paid me the most memorable compliment, the one that means more to me than any I have ever received. He said I was a ‘persistent little fucker’.

  Malcolm MacDonald was a constant visitor to Geneva, as Chairman of the United Kingdom Delegation for the International Conference on Laos. He introduced me to organisations based in Geneva with an input to developing countries. I was well received, even by David Morse, the Secretary General of the International Labour Office, but kindly advised that, whatever my exposure to the developing world, there was nowhere for me without a technical qualification. I had been following up this and other leads over a number of weeks, all with the same result. Malcolm said that the head of Britain’s Technical Co-operation Depart-ment, which was a sort of overseas development ministry, had said the same, even with Malcolm’s recommendation. An Olivier, the actor’s son, the man had said, Eton, Coldstream, Christ Church – too high falutin’ for us.

  Meanwhile I had a letter from Peter Watt saying that Hodder and Stoughton had turned down my book. He would now try Hutchinson. I suggested my old friend the publisher Jamie Hamilton, who had expressed an interest. Jamie wrote a long hand-written letter to me saying a lame ‘no’, for no particular reason, save that friendship should not influence professional decisions and that his wife Yvonne was so angry with him she was threatening divorce. Then Hutchinson said ‘no’.

  I left the Swiss Shortwave Service with a sense of utter and absolute failure; nineteen months of travel, all those people for whom the book was intended to be a worthy acknowledgement with heartfelt thanks in so many directions, followed by two years of writing and rewriting – it was too much. Taking my leave from Alice was complicated, but she had to accept that I was nowhere near thinking of marriage. It was hard to say goodbye to her.

  My mother sensed how miserable I was and drove from London to Bern in her Jaguar so we could have a holiday together, touring in France. After three rejections from publishers there was not much encouragement she could give. We drove through Annecy, Cahors with its amazing medieval bridge, St Emilion, Chenonceau and Blois. She was wonderful company.

  Through various networks in London I met the head of the Overseas Development Inst
itute, a larger than life, bombastic and bright man called William Clark. He had been Anthony Eden’s press secretary during the Suez crisis and resigned over Eden’s failure to set up a Ministry of Information in time of war. His Institute was set up in Macmillan’s premiership as a sop to Tory consciences over developing countries. Its secretariat arranged countrywide lectures, put together a superb library of treatises and relevant books, provided a meeting place for experts, and recruited postgraduates to assist the Civil Service in newly independent administrations.

  At our meeting he invited me to his mill house cottage in Cuxham, Buckinghamshire, with him and his friend David Harvey who was with the Wool Board. They both became lifelong friends. There he referred to our meeting in London as having started off uptight, and ending even upper and tighter. William was charged with self-mockery.

  ‘Oh God, why am I such a failure? I wonder if what I’m doing is wholly wise. Now he, yes I sent him to run the government of Uganda. I mean Ghana. No, Malawi.’ And when a close enough friend accused him of name-dropping he replied: ‘Funny you should mention that. The Queen Mother said the same thing only last week.’

  He introduced me to Sir Jock Campbell, later to become Baron Campbell of Eskan. He was chairman of Booker Brothers McConnell, which owned and managed almost all the sugar estates in what was then British Guiana: BG, now Guyana. They ran practically everything else as well. He was a vigorous, bright-eyed heavyweight, an Old Eton-ian scholar, so I had no problem on that score, and he wanted someone to manage the expansion of the cane fields so that Guyanese workers would own their own land and manage it. The estates had long since paid for their birth, provided health, schools, shops, playing-fields, cinemas and at the end of it all they put each worker into a box and buried him. The country was sometimes called Booker’s Guiana. The workers had little chance of gaining much sense of responsibility. As independent cane farmers they would have to.

  The scheme had been tried in Trinidad by another company. Jock wanted me to do a year’s postgraduate research there, learn all about it at the University of the West Indies and get a diploma in Tropical Agri-culture. He had been impressed with my experience of Asian peasant farmers and considered this relevant. He had no qualms about my personal background and was making a technical qualification avail-able. We talked about books, music, and various theories of economic development. He agreed that too little attention was paid to sociology, too much in abstract mathematical models across widely different cultures. I realised that at last I was on to something which fitted. He said that as a governor of the University he would put in an application on my behalf.

  Meanwhile I met many agricultural and development people and institutions. The Chairman of the Agricultural Engineers Association, Air Vice-Marshal Hopps, wanted me to help his three-man secretariat at the Royal Show in the Midlands. This was Britain’s premier agricul-tural event, covering all aspects of food farming and rural life, receiving up to 100,000 visitors over four days. The grounds were huge, several hundred acres, with lines of tents, prize competitions for every kind of livestock, machinery from small lawn edge-cutters to the largest combine harvesters, appropriately called ‘Landlord’. There were numerous refreshment tents and, being in England, a regimental band.

  A senior delegation came from the Soviet Union: their Minister of Agriculture, and four technicians. No interpreters. So for two whole days, with my under-nourished Russian, I did my best to introduce them. They wanted to see it all. Luckily the main companies like Massey Ferguson, David Brown and Fisons had their own interpreters for Russian and they did good business. One sideshow fascinated the Soviets: battery hens, only slightly automated, otherwise just like the ones in Gladys Cooper’s garden twenty years before. They ordered hundreds.

  A colleague came over to me from the AEA tent and said my mother was on the telephone. This had to be important because she knew I was being paid to help and time was not my own. I went over and picked up the receiver, worried about her.

  ‘Wonderful news,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Heinemann have accepted your book.’

  I felt blinded. ‘Heinemann …’

  ‘Yes. They want to publish your book. They’re the publishers of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, our friend Pamela Frankau.’

  Just then, outside, the regimental band started to play ‘Bali Hai’ from South Pacific. Followed by ‘A Cockeyed Optimist’. Too much.

  I told the Soviets my news, that I was now an author. The Minister could not understand what I had done – travelled alone round Asia, written a book without being commissioned, done it all entirely at my own risk. Of course, I said, why should anyone have any confidence before they had a product? It had taken four years of effort, a chance, the way one has to, with capitalism.

  He hated the concept. ‘Supposing you had failed?’

  I so nearly had.

  All was set for me to go to Trinidad that September, 1963. Heine-mann’s had given me an advance and I used this to pay the University fees.

  Nine

  Georgetown was the capital of what was then British Guiana (since 1970 the independent Guyana). It could hardly be called a city, being entirely built of wood. I stayed with Senator Tasker, an Englishman, and his wife at their grace and favour house called ‘Colgrain’. It had a gallery overlooking the wooden cathedral. He gave a drinks party for me ‘to meet the troops’ as he bracingly put it. They were almost all English, reflecting their senior staff status, in a country that was mostly East Indian with a substantial minority of Afro-Caribbeans and a few Chinese and Lebanese. They suggested I try the local rum, much the best, they said. My first sip was electrifying, unlike any I had ever tasted. It was also the most powerful. I accepted a second glass. Quite different. Bland and too sweet. Then I realised that the first had been diluted with gin instead of water. They assured me that had never happened before. They were intrigued by the job I had been selected to do and said that I was sure to enjoy the University of the West Indies in Trinidad.

  I was taken to a number of Guyanese sugar estates and had free-ranging discussions with the general managers, their staff and their workers in both factory and field. It seemed that none of the locals had any basis – be it religion, patriotism or any traditional outlook – to which an outsider like me could appeal. They had been subject to pater-nalism for so many generations they had been robbed of ambition. Fatalism had shrouded all desire to enter the world of choice. I could not imagine how I would fit in, but knew that a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Tropical Agriculture would in any event stand me in good stead in the Third World.

  The UWI in Trinidad was in tropical parkland overlooked by the northern mountain range which reached a height of 2,000 feet. There were wide lawns and fine buildings. My little concrete room was a bit like a cell, with a wash-basin, small bed and plain table with some shelves. It was part of Canada Hall, an aid project of the Toronto government for tropical agriculture. I was with a couple of dozen English BSc graduates in Agriculture from Wye College, University of London. There were also three Africans, from Nigeria, the Gambia and Cameroon, together with twenty West Indian postgraduates. Engineer-ing students were housed in Milner Hall. There were only those two faculties, the rest of the University being in Jamaica. I had to work hard to catch up on the BSc graduates’ technical knowledge, acquired over three years as undergraduates.

  Lectures were held in the mornings. Afternoons were devoted to our theses. Mine was ‘The Adoption of Innovations among Cane Farmers’. I randomly selected sixty such farmers from a list of several hundred, each with several acres of land. During the harvest campaign they cut their own cane and loaded it on bullock carts, though a few had tractors, and delivered them for weighing and purchase by the factory. Their houses were spread down the East Coast Highway which ran from Port of Spain to the Atlantic coast. It teemed with vertiginous traf-fic, dominated by ‘drop taxis’, mainly Ford Zephyrs, which screeched to a halt if they had room for you.
The drivers were mainly black, some of them huge. The journey felt like a toboggan race. At full speed, once you had named your destination, they would dictate the fare, take payment with one hand still on the wheel and give back the change. While overtaking they seemed to try to nudge the other car off the road. The taxis were garish, radios blaring calypsos sung by any number of calypso kings – the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Kitchener, the Great Pretender – to the rowdy and harshly beautiful accompaniment of steel bands.

  My cane farmers were mainly Indians, living in concrete houses on stilts. The ‘under house’ with its floor of beaten earth was where every-thing happened except sleeping. They all spoke good English, were clean and welcoming, delighted to show me their plots of sugar cane and explain their plans. Rural credit was available. Some of them had cows adored as sacred – ‘He helping me with his milk, and with pulling me cart. Fine animal.’ They had mortgages and bought tractors on hire purchase. They were far more advanced than the workers in BG. The men who attended to their field drainage did infinitely better than those who didn’t, but they were few. Most were content just to get by. Cane is a forgiving crop and they always got something, no matter how dila-tory the farming. Unlike tobacco.

  I grew fond of them. None of this was stimulating but the lecturers did their best. The main agronomist was an intellectual, a Barbadian called Pat Haines. I also admired Peter Rapsey, an independent English farmer who grew watercress and anthuriums. These he flew to London, their stems inserted into balloons, not blown up but merely to hold water, laid like soldiers in shallow cardboard boxes, to arrive next day at Moyses Stevens. We found we had friends in common and he intro-duced me to a number of others.