2. If you leave, where are you going in September? A definite plan is essential. I am not keen on crammers as most of the pupils are undisciplined louts who have failed to make the grade at school.
3. Is it important for you to have A levels? If so, are you more likely to obtain them by staying at Eton or by having tuition elsewhere? By elsewhere, I do not mean London or any other place where there is not strict supervision.
4. What is your objective to be? What are you aiming for? What qualifications do you require?
Perhaps you could discuss these matters with your Modern Tutor?
Not much news. Old General Scobie died from a heart attack. He stopped Greece going communist in 1945. Your mother has had flu. Her little plan to give up spirits for lent lasted 3½ days. Pongo has chewed up a rug and had very bad diarrhoea in the kitchen. Six Indians were killed in a car crash in Newbury.
Best love,
D
Unfortunately for Dad making plans is not on my list of priorities unless it involves the procurement of fairly large quantities of mind-altering substances. Obtaining qualifications is of scant interest.
The Sunday Times
2 March
My Dear Charles,
Thank you for your letter. Very well then, you can leave Eton at the end of the Summer Half. Make the best use of the little time that is left to you there and don’t do anything stupid. Perhaps I ought to have realised much earlier that you are not really suitable material for Eton and that a smaller school would have suited you better. I cannot pretend that your career there has been anything but a bitter disappointment to me and at times a source of profound anxiety. Both your House Tutor and your Modern Tutor agree that you ought to leave as you seem to have no future as a specialist.
The next problem is to find something for you to do and a place for you to go when you leave. I have a poor opinion of crammers. The pupils tend to be boys who have failed to make the grade morally or intellectually at school and the same can all too often be said of those who teach there. There is some truth in the old saying that there is no cad to equal a crammer’s cad. Your Modern Tutor holds an even lower opinion of crammers than I do and is well aware of the type of conduct so often rife at those institutions. Great care, therefore, must be taken to find a place which will not encourage your tendency to play the part of the little law breaker. In particular I do not wish you to go to the same place as one or two of your less responsible Eton friends. Your Modern Tutor has asked me to go and see him and with his help no doubt something can be worked out. I think you must realise you have come to a crossroads in your life. If you elect to take the wrong road now, the consequences could be very grave indeed. As you grow older, people are less willing to laugh off delinquency.
I am all in favour of you getting a couple of A levels but what worries me is that in ten years of costly education, you have never had a good report and have never got down to hard work. What assurance have I got that you will work harder and be more responsible away from school? Plenty of boys seem to get A levels at Eton without working themselves into a state of collapse. Why not you?
You can rely on me to do all I can to help you but you can hardly blame me for being cautious, even sceptical, after some of the incidents of the past year. Our family all tend to be late developers and I think you come into that category, too. I think you have it in you to lead a useful and happy life but very soon you must take yourself by the scruff of your neck, shake yourself and determine to get down to work and be less self-indulgent.
Jane is here and sends her love. She is going to France at Easter with some people I have never heard of. Louise has a ghastly cough and Solly has picked up an infection and is thoroughly unwell. A girl was stabbed in Yateley outside Janice’s home. The Camberley Art Centre in Camberley High Street has been burnt down; arson is suspected. I saw one of your nicer friends, Higgins, at Kempton. Mr Parkinson is showing signs of marrying again. I hope it will be third time lucky.
Yours ever,
D
P.S. Never forget that your mother and I love you very much and perhaps that is why we worry so much and I feel compelled to write long and probably pompous letters of admonition and reproof. We both long to see you happy and settled, and whatever mistakes we make over you, they are made with the best possible intentions.
Clearly my time at Eton has been a disaster all round. Despite my poor parents’ supremely good intentions I am not the ideal candidate for England’s premier public school.
Budds Farm
22 March
Dear Charles,
I enclose £12 for leaving presents. Please deduct 10/ and have your hair cut. As by the end of the week you will no longer be a school boy, there is no necessity for you to look the part any longer.
Naturally I am distressed at you leaving Eton so suddenly and with so little accomplished, but you have evidently been determined to leave and of course you have got your way. What next? I simply don’t know. Most unfortunately – and perhaps this is my fault – you cannot communicate your thoughts, fears and hopes to me, and in all but the most trivial matters we are strangers. Because of this I cannot help you as I should like. Something seems to have gone very wrong somewhere, but I am almost entirely in the dark. I think, and those who know you best at Eton agree, that you have been unfortunate in the past year in your choice of friends. Naturally I am worried about you, desperately worried, possibly because I know so little of the true situation. Perhaps we can sort something out when you come home but you will need to be franker and more communicative than in the past. Possibly I am less unsympathetic than I appear on the surface; my own adolescence was beset with problems and I made many mistakes. I cannot direct your life; at the most I can guide, advise and perhaps help in a few small ways but to carry out those functions I must have a little help from you.
I suppose the process of growing up is difficult, confusing and sometimes painful for you; it brings sometimes grief and worry to parents, too. I feel very sad when I think of the fun we used to have in the old days. Perhaps something can be salvaged from the wreck before the gulf between us gets impossibly wide.
I wonder if you realise how lucky you have been in the last year in having a House Tutor and a Modern Tutor who both like you, have always been at pains to emphasise to me your best points and always speak up for you. When you are older, you may realise you owe them a considerable debt.
Best love,
D
Largely oblivious to the distress and disappointment of my folks I simply cannot wait to leave. The term after I depart, a boy in my house is caught smoking. When the house master punishes him he objects: ‘That’s not fair, sir. You allowed Mortimer to smoke.’ ‘Now,’ says my old House Tutor with suitable gravitas, ‘there was a boy who really needed to smoke.’
I enclose for your attention my telephone bill (Jumbo size). Please note calls to Hurt at 8/0, 11/4 and 18/. I think no further comment is needed but please be temperate in this matter. I don’t think I overcharged you!!
D
29 May
Thank you for your card, you cheeky monkey! I hope you are settling in and that the crammer is not too hopeless!
The Gaselees are staying here tonight and a man of eighty-four with a beard comes to lunch tomorrow. I am off to the Derby Dinner tonight + visit General Fisher en route. Nidnod is in a flap and keeps losing £5 notes; I think she is under the impression that I pinch them. I have paid for your shares – Woodfall Trust – keep an eye on them. I’ll get you the receipt, don’t lose it, it is very important as regards tax. Some men are putting down carpet in the W.C.
We had a disgusting dinner in Newbury last night.
Be reasonably good,
D
I am now lodging in Brighton with Joyce Walker, a friend of my parents. She has a wonderful voice crafted over the years from generous quantities of untipped Virginia cigarettes and Gordon’s gin. I attend a crammer daily in the vain hope of finally reaching the heady he
ights of knowledge required to bag a humble Maths O level.
The Sunday Times
4 June
My Dear Lupin,
I am glad to hear you are happy at Brighton and that all goes reasonably well. I don’t suppose you will want to come home at the end of the month! There were two communications for you today from the Ministry of Defence and I opened them just in case they were urgent and knowing they would not be personal. One says you have been accepted for the Regiment (as a candidate); the other is about your five days at Tidworth starting on 13 July. I want you to be at the Old Coldstreamers party here on 13 July and you can drive to Tidworth (only thirty miles) in my car or Nidnod’s afterwards. Incidentally it was Fred who drew the ticket (Belbury) in the Sweep.
Yesterday I had to go to a memorial service for Brigadier Cazenove, who commanded the 1st Bn in Belgium in 1940. Quite a nice service and I am always very moved when the band plays old Coldstream marches at the end of the service. It was pouring with rain when I came by but luckily I got a lift with Major Pope.
In the afternoon I went to ‘Oh What a Lovely War’. Of course I enjoyed the songs, but it not a film for me as firstly I remember the first war quite well; secondly I was a soldier for seventeen years; and thirdly I have studied military history.
I have seen many of the people portrayed in the film and of course the actors bore as much resemblance in appearance and character as Mick Jagger does to Alice in Wonderland. In the entire film there was not one single person who looked like a soldier; they looked like actors – some of them not very good ones – in clothes hired from a seedy provincial theatrical costumier. History was twisted to give a certain point of view, and it was so far from the truth that I was seldom moved at all. I thought a ghastly tragedy was too often turned into rather tawdry farce. I cannot read the official history of the Battle of the Somme without tears coming into my eyes at the thought of the flower of English manhood being slaughtered – most of them not conscripts or regular soldiers but young and idealistic volunteers. I was tremendously moved by World War I in that BBC serial because it showed the terrible truth and did not distort facts to produce rather naive and bogus propaganda. If our leaders had been all such dolts, how in God’s name did we win against the might of the greatest military power the world has ever known, backed by the superb planning and organisation of the German General Staff? At the start of that war we could put about seven divisions (12,000 men in each) into the field; the Germans about 130. Haig was admittedly stubborn, unimaginative and insensitive, but he won in 1918 some of the greatest victories ever achieved by British arms. The film, with cheap and puerile inaccuracy, seems to try and make out that all officers were nits and took no part in the fighting; in fact casualties among officers were proportionately far higher than among other ranks as they had to lead and take more risks. Look at the names on the 1914–18 war memorial at Eton. In most regiments, relationships between officers and other ranks in war-time are very close, based on shared risks and interdependence for survival.
In the evening I went to Whitehall to hear the massed bands of the Guards Division, with the mounted bands of the Household Cavalry, beat retreat. I think you would have enjoyed some of it, particularly the introduction to ‘Lohengrin’ and one or two slow marches; possibly, too, ‘Chitty Bang Bang’ and the ‘Posthorn Gallop’!
Some more pictures come up for sale at Christie’s on 20 June. I saw the solicitor about your inheritance yesterday. It will be invested at compound interest till you are twenty-one when you can do as you please. Jane will get hers right away.
Give my love to Joyce.
D
In a moment of madness I agree to go on a trial five-day stay with the Coldstream Guards. Unfortunately in the interim I am arrested for possession of drugs and a flick knife at the Rolling Stones concert in Hyde Park, which rather puts the damper on things. This letter arrives just prior to all the drama. My mother is particularly annoyed that I appear on the front page of the Newbury Weekly News, overshadowing the mention on the back page that her Dalmation, Pongo, had taken first prize in the fancy-dress class as the Captain of HMS Pinafore.
I have just paid a telephone bill for the enormous sum of £68. As I have hardly used the telephone at all myself, I shall be grateful for contributions.
RM
Another phone bill and Dad pleads poverty.
Budds Farm
Sunday
Dear Charles,
I am very impulsive. Your mother is also very impulsive. That is quite enough for one family. Let us have a little planning, forethought and sensible deliberation from you. So to start with, get rid of that bloody bicycle. I did not give you £40 for that, as you well know!
Yours ever,
RM
The ‘bicycle’ alluded to is actually my motorcycle, a beloved Honda Monkey Bike.
Dear Charles,
As a bourgeois reactionary, I am inclined to think you pursue your code of being scruffy and uncouth a little too far. Last night you parked the Bubbler flush with the front door so that elderly guests arriving for dinner could hardly get in the house at all. Dinner was at 8.15 and you saw fit to appear at 8.40, well after the guests. Even allowing for the fact that you cannot yet tie a bow tie, a sweat rag coiled round your neck is a somewhat unattractive form of evening dress. Your hands looked as if you had been greasing a No. 19 bus and had given them a quick flick over with a damp sponge. When called to the telephone, you saw fit to stay away for fifteen minutes; hardly a compliment to your neighbours at the dinner table.
I don’t expect you to be a second Lord Chesterfield, but I rather wish that in appearance and conduct, you were slightly less typical of a transport cafe on the Great North Road.
Don’t get into trouble tonight!
D
An absolute classic. ‘The Bubbler’ is my purple bubble car with faux tiger-skin seat covers.
1970
With regard to your trip to Greece, I wish to make the following points, which no doubt will be totally disregarded:
1. Make sure before you start that your passport is in order + that you have the required visas for yourself and documents for your car. It is important to carry full insurance.
2. Drive carefully. In Europe they are far, far tougher on motorists than they are here. If you get involved in an accident, you may easily and up in gaol. It would be quite beyond my power to extract you if, for instance, you get locked up in Yugoslavia.
3. On no account get involved in any form of political argument. The Greeks love politics and arguments and Greece is now a Police State.
4. Have nothing to do with drugs unless you are particularly keen to pass the next seven years in prison.
5. Try not to look like some filthy student who has renounced personal hygiene completely. The unwashed with long hair are looked upon with great hostility in certain European countries and it would be silly to be stopped at a frontier because you like wearing your hair like a 1923 typist.
6. If you do get into trouble, Interpol will soon find out you have a police record and that could be awkward.
7. Take plenty of money. You need not spend it all.
8. Take a small medicine box and plenty of bromo. You are one of nature’s diarrhoea sufferers.
9. Make sure all your headlights are adapted to the rules of the country you are in.
10. If in trouble, contact the British Consul.
11. Some of the drink in Greece is very powerful indeed and can give you the most appalling headache.
12. Be v. careful to whom you give a lift. Stick to girls, they are safer and usually more amusing.
13. Do not carry a flick knife or any nonsense of that sort.
14. Take a shady hat; the temperature in Greece will be over 100°F and sunstroke is rather unpleasant and distressing.
15. Enjoy yourself + don’t do anything too stupid. I trust you + P.B. together not quite as far as I could kick a thirty-ton concrete block.
RM
&n
bsp; Time for my summer holiday. This is a final fling before rather an impetuous decision to join the Coldstream Guards as a squaddie in October. Due to a conviction for possession of marijuana I am not able to join as a potential officer. As the Colonel in Chief remarks to me in an interview, ‘If you were merely an alcoholic we wouldn’t give a damn.’
7 October
My Dearest Charles,
I am very clumsy at having little talks with my own family so I will try, no doubt inadequately, to say a few things before you leave to join the Coldstream. Firstly, I wish you every possible good fortune and happiness. I was never a particularly good soldier but I was a very happy one. It would be untrue to say, though, that I was happy straightaway; I was not. I had anxious, even unhappy days before I settled in. I have no doubt that in the next few weeks moments, perhaps days, will occur when you will curse your decision to join; you will feel tired, frustrated, angry and totally fed up. I certainly went through that phase during my first term at Sandhurst and I wondered if I was ever going to make the grade; I did, but it was a near thing once or twice. You have two assets; firstly, in a stoical sort of way you have plenty of courage; secondly, you have a sense of the ridiculous, a sense without which the Army is hardly the ideal profession for civilised individuals. I think you get on with people, too. Also you are good with your hands whereas I was, and am, inconceivably inept. Your fellow recruits will probably be working-class boys from the north. Most of them will have never left home before and you will in many ways be tougher and more worldly-wise than they are. Also you are – or at least ought to be – rather better educated. So you will have certain advantages. From the start play by the rules even if you think the rules are silly; show yourself above all reliable and a trier; don’t, above all, try any smart tricks or chance your arm in any way; you will come off second best. Just try your hardest even at truly ghastly things like PT which I myself hated above all. Be very clean at all times; Army doctors have a nasty little trick of making inspections and examining every inch, literally, of your anatomy and if they find anything not 100 per cent clean they send in an adverse report. Keep your money locked up; don’t lend any and watch your kit. I don’t think you will have any serious troubles but if you think there is anything seriously wrong – bullying or petty dishonesty by older soldiers or NCOs – let me know at once. That sort of thing is rare, very rare in the Coldstream, but it is not absolutely impossible. When you get allowed out of barracks, watch your step very carefully and don’t do anything silly. If anything, be a bit of a prig to start with!
Dear Lumpy Page 15