So Who's Your Mother

by Tarquin Olivier

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said perkily, ‘are you Sir Ralph Richardson by any chunce?’

  Ralph drew himself up and looked down at him, his head slightly shaking as it always did.

  ‘Yaas,’ he said. ‘By chance … I am.’

  The man vanished.

  Peter Meinertzhagen and Eric Hall agreed with my recommendation to leave Cyprus well alone. I dived back into being Acting Secretary of the Estimates Committee, now familiar in numeric terms with the foibles of many kinds of business. It did seem as if the original estimates themselves could be done more efficiently. I did some research into computers. Early days at the time. I worked at it over a number of weeks and Peter Meinertzhagen saw that many hours could be saved but HO accountants hated the concept. A decade later, of course, you could hardly move for all the computers everywhere.

  Riddelle took the children to stay with friends of hers in Eire: Kinsale, County Cork. With her, any absence from me always gave rise to the most electrifying welcomes. This was a whole week. Her welcome was rapturous. She couldn’t take her eyes off me that first evening but by next day she was back to her moody normal. Her friends were Honour and Paddy. He bred pigs which he sold to the local abattoir. Honour told me Riddelle had kept saying she wanted to be free, she wanted to be free, and she had tried telling her that with two small children she couldn’t be. She and Paddy were a delightful Anglo-Irish couple, their house as elegant as they were when out of working clothes; proper country people with the pig farm out of sight over the hill; large white pigs, just like Larry’s at Notley.

  When out riding I noticed that none of the iron gates opened prop-erly, making you have to dismount. Paddy was more than happy for me to heave each one over to the workshop and spot-weld it with a template to hold the broken hinges together. After a few days we could open every gate from horseback. This gained his confidence and I broached the subject of computerised farm planning. He leapt at the idea. He had been hoping to expand his pig breeding several times over but was unsure how. I put him in contact with Farm Planning and Computer Services and within a few years he had tripled his output. His management accounts had become less of a pain, more of a doddle.

  Judy Garland had had a wildly successful season in 1964 at the London Palladium which my mother and I had been to see. She was immensely fat then but it made no difference to the audience. Everyone took her to their hearts, her all-enveloping personality, her legendary status and her matchless voice. We went round to her dressing room afterwards and she was so happy to see us. She said I looked far too young even to think of writing a book.

  In 1969 I went to see her with Riddelle when she was singing at The Talk of the Town. This was also a stunning success but she had become so thin her thighs were no bigger round than her knees. Even so the power of her voice was almost too much. In her dressing room after the show she was delighted to meet Riddelle and asked us to come to the British Film Institute on the South Bank where she was having a retrospective of her old movies. That night A Star Is Born was being shown. As she went behind the curtain to get ready we chatted with Mickey Deans whom she had just married; a fine-looking thirty-year-old pianist and disc jockey with a pleasant bass voice. There were also two Catholic priests in dog-collars. I could not help thinking that was a bad sign.

  Riddelle and I drove over to the South Bank and went into one of the BFI cinemas. A couple of dozen others took their seats as Mickey Deans played some gentle popular songs on the piano until we were all settled down. We sat right behind him and Judy. They were stroking each other rather sweetly and she turned to tell me she really had found the right man. As soon as the lights were dimmed and the film started her concentration on the screen was absolute. She commented on how wonderful all the extras were, so authentic.

  At the intermission the lights went up and we all made our way out. Riddelle and I walked along the riverbank, under the globe-shaped street lamps on dolphin stands. It was one in the morning, calm, with London asleep between the golden face of Big Ben shining over the Palace of Westminster and the floodlit dome of St Paul’s Cathedral above the City. I commented to Riddelle that I knew what was happen-ing: Judy was viewing her work as a prelude to saying goodbye to her life. Within a fortnight she was dead.

  At last we got our overseas posting to Jamaica with me as executive assistant to the Regional Controller, Gordon Firmston-Williams. He was an Old Harrovian, blimpish and with a reputation for not getting on with people, especially his staff. However I was glad to be going back to the tropics where the climate and the life style suited Riddelle. I could rent 31 Queensdale Road, make it self-financing, and repay my overdraft. A further delight was that my great-uncle, Sydney Olivier, had twice been Governor of Jamaica in the early nineteen hundreds and had written two enthusiastic books about it. The Jamaicans had taken to him. There is an Olivier Road around the northern part of Kingston, and the Olivier Shield for inter-schools football. He was one of the founders of the Webbs’ Fabians and served in the first Labour govern-ment. He became Secretary of State for India and was given a peerage.

  I left England six weeks ahead of my family so as to organise hous-ing. My predecessor had been a bachelor and lived in a dump. In London Riddelle got in touch with our rich friends and together with her they had the time of their lives. She turned them into dance fanatics at Annabel’s almost every night. It became a way of life. She was as energetic on the dance floor with them as she and I had been when first together. She was free.

  For my first week I stayed with Gordon and his wife Joan who had been crippled with polio. She shunted herself round in a wheelchair, drove his Jaguar with élan and was lovely to be with. I could not under-stand why she had married such a bore. For openers he wanted me to write his three- month report on all the Caribbean projects. As a trained journalist I quickly put together Gordon’s three-month report and this got things off to an excellent start.

  CDC’s rent allowance may have been enough for my predecessor, but not for a family of four. Eventually I plumped for a sizeable house with an acre of garden in Havendale Heights, off Stoney Hill Road, with a small house for a maid, but unfurnished, so I bought beds, a wrought-iron and glass dining table and six chairs. The rest I decided to make myself: the sofa and chairs in the drawing room.

  Jock Campbell and William Clark had given me introductions: to Edna Manley, widow of Norman Washington Manley, one of the founders of Jamaican Independence and mother of Michael Manley, Leader of the Opposition; to some of the leading journalists and writ-ers; to the chief Bank of England representative, and others. I decided to keep these new friendships to myself because none of them knew Gordon. He was a recluse.

  I drove round the island and stayed with an English-born farming family. They had a seven-foot bath made of wood which Sydney Olivier would have used when he stayed there. A major CDC project was on the north coast: Ocho Rios had four high-rise holiday apartment blocks under construction called Turtle Beach, overlooking a bay of sand reclaimed from the sea, awaiting the construction of a large holiday village with lots of shops which, when complete, would enhance land values ready to be sold lucratively to a Sheraton or Hilton.

  Noël Coward lived nearby in a house called ‘Firefly’, overlooking Puerta Maria and Oracabessa, just down the road from Ian Fleming’s house ‘Golden Eye’, which Noëlie called ‘Golden Ears Nose and Throat’. I had lunch with him and his secretary Cole Lesley (‘Coley’) on a Sunday, after they had been to Mass for fun. After a few strong bull shots they described the locals in their Sunday bests, all with shiny black faces and the little girls with angelic pigtails, the women with dark straw hats with veils. During the liturgy in Latin the priest kept seeming to say ‘Oracabessa Puerta Maria, Oracabessa,’ and they had had to control their giggles.

  Noël said they both loved cooking but in that heat they often stood over the stove with no clothes on, except for an apron. While Noël was attending to a sauce the doorbell rang. It was the vicar. Noël told him it was a crucial mome
nt for the sauce he was stirring, he would only be a minute and turned back to the stove. When he returned, the vicar had gone.

  Riddelle arrived exhausted with Tristan and Isis, now aged four and nearly three. They all loved the house and garden, the kitchen was stocked, the beds made, high chairs by the dining table, and I cooked their favourite food: steaks for us and chopped roast chicken for them. The previous occupant had left me with a lovely yellow Labrador called Tammy, the gentlest of creatures. We had never had a dog before and the timing was perfect for the children. We found a nice maid called Celeste.

  Every morning on my way to work in downtown Kingston, near the harbour, I dropped Tristan off from my Ford Cortina at Hillel School. Riddelle collected him for lunch in her Ford Prefect, both cars thanks to loans from CDC. She settled down with my new friends far better than she had in London. With Celeste in the house and a gardener she had plenty of time to spend on her pictures. She had moved on to compos-ing sprightly animals of cut out felt, pictures of flower arrangements, all beautifully framed for sale. She started to follow the constructivist school using three-dimensional objects. I brought round the owner of the John Peartree Gallery. He was critical of her constructivist pieces. The rest he liked, their precision and sense of abandon, and wanted to give a showing in his gallery.

  At work I was made responsible for CDC’s Jamaican portfolio, apart from being Gordon’s dogsbody. The Kingston developmental back-ground was considerable. The town was next to the original harbour which had been too shallow for large modern ships. The dockyards and warehousing, the stevedores and violent crime made a widespread mess of the place. CDC financed the Matalon Group to create a huge land reclamation scheme to one side for a large acreage of foreshore reclaimed to accommodate light industry. With the core taken from the seabed the newly deepened water became a modern harbour. There was ample space for warehousing and the rest of it.

  There was a shortage of land for low-cost housing needed by the burgeoning population, so further reclamation was made the other side of the bay, with an elegant causeway and bridge across to it. Each prefabricated house was made from pre-cast cement walls, already embedded with electric wiring and plumbing. There was plenty of room between each so that owners could build on patios, more rooms and plant gardens and trees. Within a few years Portmore had become attractive, made possible by CDC’s mortgage finance company. Further land was constantly being created, using a dredging barge with a giant revolving drill which sucked up the sea bed with tons of water pumped by pipeline to the land being created, which would then take months to dry out.

  My largest project was to be the Kingston Beach Hotel, on Portmore, the jewel in that particular crown, beside a reclaimed beach of white sand and a view down Kingston Bay and across the city to the glorious Blue Mountain. Put like that it sounds irresistible and so everybody thought except for me. That was to be my downfall. Let me explain.

  The bay was like a horseshoe with Kingston at the base. Palisadoes Airport was at the far left-hand point. The hotel guests would be driven miles along the isthmus, turning in towards the capital. They would go through the most unattractive part of it, which offices were moving away from, even CDC, in preference for New Kingston which was a few miles inland. The hotel guests would skirt the industrial area and head towards Portmore, along the causeway, over the bridge, and even-tually, after nearly an hour, reach the hotel, at the top right-hand end of the horseshoe. This was just under the flight part of aircraft coming in to land. The second shortcoming was that by 11 a.m. every morning there was a rushing wind sweeping in from the sea and across the beach towards an extensive dry area beyond Portmore which became extremely hot and created an updraft, sucking in the gale. It was almost impossible to sit outside because of the sand blowing in your face. A third problem was that the sea water was filthy from all the shipping, which gave the white sand beach no chance. So much for geography. The statistical fact was that there was no room for a further 200-bedroom hotel. There were too many hotels under construction.

  The Minister of Tourism’s Permanent Secretary paid Gordon a visit and said they were most concerned. He was a big intelligent brown Jamaican like most of my friends. Confronted by Gordon’s refusal to do other than think well of his favourite project, the man exclaimed: ‘Dat damned ting goin’ to be a lemon!’ Gordon replied that the invest-ment was already a commitment. That was true, but it could have been cancelled. No wheelbarrows or piling hammers were at work on site. I was still engaged in negotiating the building contract with Cementation but it was obvious that nothing could change his mind. Even the Regional Finance Officer rejected my doubts: ‘it would be good for Portmore’ became a mantra.

  So I had to let the contract to Cementation. I called up the capital for this direct CDC project to be managed by Hallway Hotels, and redid the fifteen-year cash flows on the preposterous assumption of 65% occupancy. Frankipile jack hammers arrived within a couple of months and there started that spectacle which always excites me, the sheer muscle involved in creating foundations at the start of a major construction. A year later the hotel opened and within five months everyone in CDC could see that it was about to go belly up. It did. Bankrupt. A terrible and foreseeable waste of money and very bad ‘for Portmore’. By that time I had been sacked for opposing the project. Sacked before being proven right. Not wholly wise.

  Gordon grew fond of Riddelle and the children. They had us for lunch. He was sweet with his crippled wife, picking her up in his arms and lowering her into their swimming pool. We sat round after bathing with gins and tonics in our hands, feet in the water. Isis went over to him and pointed to his belly which rested on his thighs. ‘Gordon,’ she said, rather surprisingly for a 3A-year-old child, ‘you’ve got a tummy like a bosom!’

  At home I was busy making furniture. I had the merchant saw the timber into the lengths I wanted so all I had to do was chisel out mortice and tenon joints. The single chairs were ordinary but the sofa pleased us. It was long enough for us to sit at opposite ends and touch our feet together, the arms behind us boomerang-shaped to wrap round our backs, ending with a six-sided surface to put our glasses on. We chose lovely materials for the cushions. In the street I found a large empty spool for carrying cables, six feet in diameter, and rolled it home. One of the gardeners I passed asked: ‘Man, you gotta licence for di wheeled traffic?’ I used one round surface to make a pouffe covered with a soft mattress and the other for a patio table.

  All that was tactile and sensuous between us remained in perfect order, but not the rest. The stress at home was more wearing than at the office. Ever since Isis started going to school the mercies of Mother Nature had lost their fond embrace of Riddelle. Our very different characters were confronted by reality. One morning she passed out while in a dentist’s chair. He rang and advised me to take her to hospi-tal. On a return visit there after work I had collected her wedding and engagement rings from home and put them on her finger as she slept. She had had related problems before but this was the worst.

  While she was recuperating and I was alone with the children there was a staggering thunderstorm, seeming to blast the rain down in unin-terrupted sticks. The flashes of lightning frightened the children. The thunder shook the house, so I invented a game. At each flash we would breathe in and then, as the crash followed, we would shout ‘Hurray!!!’ Tristan and Isis were instantly thrilled, full of chatter over their dinner when the storm died down, and as good as gold in their bath.

  As always, our absence from each other brought us infinitely closer together on Riddelle’s return from the hospital. We bought an enor-mous Jamaican four-poster bed. The house and garden started to look settled and lovely. This was enhanced when Tammy went on heat and tried to satisfy every dog in the neighbourhood. Sometimes she and a mate ‘got knotted’ and Tristan would say ‘I’m fed up. Tammy is bottom to bottom again.’ In no time she produced her litter. One of the puppies called Satchmo died early on and the children cried. They told all their friends that S
atchmo died, and everything was very sad. We found good homes for the others and kept a yellow and a black one, called Engel-bert and Humperdink. Everything got better.

  The friendships I had started almost on arrival were maturing and meaningful. The politicians were mostly in the opposition party, the journalists and writers of every point of view. My relationships with all of them had started with a bang at Edna Manley’s house. A big man and his big wife, Douglas and Sheila Graham, were trying to work out my family background. I took the time solemnly to explain the grand-parents, step-grandparents, half-grandparents, the many and varied parents, and even more lugubriously the generation further down the line of half-brothers and sisters, my stepsister, and summarised by saying my father had really fucked up the family tree. They burst out laughing. After that I was one of them.

  An increasing concern in Kingston was the burgeoning crime, especially in the slums of Western Kingston. The gangs had strong political allegiances. If you, a municipal worker, were a supporter of the People’s National Movement, the PNM, and the Jamaica Labour Party, the JLP, won the election you were out of a job. This division was sealed in blood. Elections were fought with machetes and terror. There seemed no way towards harmony.

  I had an idea. The rich industrialists, financiers and propertied fami-lies had marked civic consciousness and charitable dispositions. The main companies were conglomerates, making everything required for building anything. There was a shortage of simple wooden school-rooms and hospital wards, while in Western Kingston and elsewhere there were men with craft skills such as plumbers, electricians, carpen-ters and cement layers, unemployed. You could put these together with the right materials. In return for an excellent lunch you could attract the labour to do the work.