Delving into his own subconscious, Gerald proposed that his father’s laissez-faire approach had affected him in matters of religion. ‘It is said’, he wrote, ‘that a child’s idea of God is often based on the characteristics of its male parent.’ Once, a nurse warned the young boy that if he was not careful, ‘God will jump out from behind a cloud and catch you such a whack!’ Gerald merely replied, ‘Nonsense! God doesn’t care WHAT we do.’8 Gerald’s mistrust of organised religion remained, though there were times when he wished he did have religious faith and regretted his lack of ‘aptitude’ for it, believing it to be something innate, like having a musical ear. Always keen to go against the grain, he liked to recall his hilarious misreadings of the Bible as a child, where he would automatically take the side of miscreants like Adam and Eve or Cain. Gerald used the language and trappings of Christianity to make it seem ridiculous: ‘There is a legend that Our Lord said “Blessed are the Frivolous, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” and that it was suppressed by St Paul!’9 One of Gerald’s fictional characters announces a sentiment that seems to characterise his own lack of piety: ‘When I was a child I used to think that the Day of Judgement meant that we were all going to judge God, and I still don’t see why not.’10
Underlying Gerald’s witticism is the pain of a boy who is ignored and made to feel insignificant and unworthy by his grumpy, mostly absent father. And yet throughout his life, Gerald held one of his father’s sayings almost as a mantra: ‘Never trust a man with a grievance.’ If the boy’s achievements were not enough to bring paternal praise and love, then perhaps the only way was by doing things that would jar and annoy. Playing the fool can act not only as a way of attracting attention, but of subverting paternalistic authority; a symptom of pessimism as well as playfulness.11 There remained a side of Gerald throughout his life that refused to be seen to take anything seriously; even his music was filled with jokes and parody, as though he could not risk appearing to try too hard and then be confronted with rejection. His love of disguises and fancy dress might also be linked to a fear of being himself – so much easier to put on another face and make people laugh. According to one friend, Gerald claimed to have dressed up as a wizard when he was young, so as to enthral other children. ‘Robed, masked and bewigged’, he burnt incense, rang bells and claimed as his familiar a huge white Belgian hare enthroned on a hassock.12
Gerald’s friend Osbert Sitwell suggested that he was ‘addicted to wit or humour as less gifted individuals are victims to drink or drugs’.13 This implies that joking became a significant weapon against despair, tedium and frustration. It also hints that this trait was not always a positive element in his relations with others; some thought Gerald’s teasing could stray into the realm of unkindness.
Julia was a more reliable presence in Gerald’s early years, though he hardly appreciated her maternal skills when he wrote about her later. After her death, he accused her of being humourless, narrow-minded, conventional and, like so many in her family and social class, obsessed with country sports. There was shooting and fishing, but fox-hunting was her principal interest. She was an excellent horsewoman and Gerald claims that he ‘never ventured to dispute the point of view that to ride well was the main object of life’. The boy tried to live up to his mother’s ambitions, but to no avail. ‘I grew to dislike riding more and more, but the ideal of “manliness” was constantly held up to me, and manfully I persevered.’ He wondered why it was unmanly to cling to the pommel of the saddle when that was obviously helpful, or why it was manly to kill a rook or a rabbit but unmanly to hurt a dog.14
Like many creative people who come from dull or uninspiring families, Gerald was bemused by the banality of his own background. ‘My ancestors, for several generations back, appear to have been country squires or business men with recreations of an exclusively sporting nature; although, of course, it is quite possible that there may have been among them a few artistic ladies who painted in water-colours, visited Italy or played on the harp.’ Gerald felt himself to be the black sheep among his cousins and friends, living in fear and dread of humiliation because he could not ride well. While he was able to find refuge and inspiration in painting, literature and music, these were activities that counted for little among uncultured country grandees. He implies that he sprang, mysteriously creative, like Dionysus from Zeus’s thigh and he attempted in later life to distance himself from his forebears – an irony for someone who inherited a title. He mentions a story of some long-gone gypsy blood in the family, hinting that these irregular genes might have surfaced in him. Indeed, others later noted his un-English appearance, with sallow skin and luminous black eyes; ‘more Continental’ or Jewish, some suggested.15 Siegfried Sassoon described him to Virginia Woolf in 1924 as ‘a Kilburn Jew’, and she agreed – a strange indication of their snobbish anti-Semitism and a peculiarly inappropriate term to use when both knew he was nothing of the kind.16
The sense of being different makes a good story, but the truth about Gerald’s family relations may be more hazy. Julia’s diaries and letters show that while she was indeed a tough, critical woman who was more at home in the stables than the salon, she also painted and encouraged her son to do so. She and Gerald would set off on their bicycles armed with watercolour sets, and settle down to paint charming corners of the Shropshire landscape. Julia’s diaries mention her only son frequently and she wrote to him with a tone of maternal affection and concern. She always made a note of when she heard from or saw her husband, so there are hints that the family was not as cold or uncultured as they were posthumously portrayed. Indeed, an affectionate letter from Captain Tyrwhitt to his son displays an easy amicability that does not fit Gerald’s story.17
Whatever the parents themselves believed, and despite certain factual inaccuracies in Gerald’s memoirs, the boy himself did not feel that he was appreciated and loved. This sense of being an outsider was later to be used by him to his advantage, but it may well have been at the root of some of his inherent sadness. The painful boredom associated with his paternal grandmother, Lady Berners (depicted as the ghastly Lady Bourchier in his memoirs), also left its mark. Her puritanical piety and narrow-mindedness surely contributed to Gerald’s largesse, his love of luxury and, above all, his repugnance towards anything dull.
Gerald adored animals throughout his life. From school, he wrote to his mother, ‘How are cat, dogs, birds, horses, pigs, poultry?’ But his favourites were a different style from those favoured by his mother. Julia was inseparable from her horses and dogs, which included a spaniel, a collie, a fox terrier and a bloodhound, all of which were, according to her son, like her: loyal, rather dull and utterly predictable in their habits. When Gerald grew up, he would have dogs, but they would be decorative ones like Dalmatians, whose necks were hung not with practical leather collars but sparkling necklaces. Far more than dogs, however, Gerald loved birds, and these were the creatures that came to define his style and soothe his soul. ‘At a very young age I became a bird bore,’ he confessed, though as well as pretending to be a bird and making nests in the barn, he knew a great deal about ornithology. His idea of a childhood treat was poring over the weighty volumes of Gould’s Birds of Great Britain, and in later life he told a friend how his purchase of a reproduction of Audubon’s Birds of America had made his day.18 He recommended it as ‘an infallible cure for falling chins and wobbling upper lips’ – symptoms of the melancholy and desolation which always lurked in his shadow. It is eminently appropriate that the Tyrwhitt family legend tells of a distant ancestor who was killed in battle, and how the mournful cries of three lapwings or peewits (also known as ‘tyrwhits’) drew searchers to find his body. The family took the noisy, gleaming-feathered tyrwhit’s name and placed its image on their shield.
Among Gerald’s earliest inspirations was the screen in his paternal grandmother’s drawing room which, in his memory, was pasted with vivid pictures of unfamiliar, beautiful flowers, hummingbirds, doves of Siam and birds-of-paradise. Many years
later he came across the screen in an old storeroom and was bewildered and disappointed to find that he had remembered it wrong. In reality, it was mostly country sporting scenes and political caricatures and the colourful flora and fauna were few and located far from a young child’s viewpoint, near the top.
Another source for Gerald’s youthful delight in birds and flowers was his beloved Aunt Constance. Handicapped after a riding accident, she had decorated her room with cages of birds, gaily coloured wallpaper and flowers all around. Gerald was transported by the atmosphere and loved helping her undo parcels of dresses and hats sent from Paris and London, and taking a look at her old Court dress and ageing ostrich feathers.
Like the many exotic birds he would later own, Gerald hoped to fly away from the place he came from and surround himself with beauty. His attraction to jewel-coloured tropical birds and flowers was in direct contrast to the sensible, earth-coloured dogs and dauntingly tall horses that he felt took first place in his family’s heart. At Faringdon there would be birds-of-paradise strolling on the lawn and into the house. Another favourite would be the trumpeter bird, which he trained to leap from the ground to take titbits from his hand. A small, dumpy, dark-feathered thing from South America, like a hunched black chicken on tall, skinny legs, the trumpeter has stunning patches of iridescent plumage in purple, green and bronze on its chest and under its wings. It is something like Gerald himself – physically modest, without the showy beauty of other more obviously attractive creatures, but with flashes of brilliance, comic intelligence, flights of fancy, and a trumpeting call that could shock. Gerald appreciated an animal you could laugh with as well as admire, and one that could intrigue without being practical – like the eponymous camel in his 1936 novel, which arrives unexpectedly at a village vicarage one morning. Gerald liked to be surprised – anything but the practical, predictable animals of his childhood. As an adult, he didn’t mind going for a ride on a horse, and it seems likely that his attitude to hunting was rather like Antonia’s, the vicar’s wife in The Camel. Due to her great love of animals, she was ‘very much averse to blood sports, but she objected far less to foxhunting than to the other forms of harrying wild beasts. Firstly because it gave pleasure to a large number of ladies and gentlemen, some of whom were her personal friends . . . And secondly because foxes very frequently made incursions into her hen coop.’
Although Gerald was wont to reject his family background, he adored his early home, Apley Park, which he calls Arley in his memoir. A romantic eighteenth-century edifice with turrets and Gothic flourishes, it was set in beautiful parkland in a valley through which the River Severn flowed. If the people surrounding him at Apley were not always caring or appealing, Gerald admitted that the place was particularly significant to him. ‘When I hear cats spoken of slightingly as being “more attached to places than to people” I always feel a little conscience-stricken.’ Wealth and luxury were taken for granted; there were twenty house servants within the crenellated walls, in addition to gardeners and estate workers.19 But these privileges are not usually the source of happiness to a child, and Gerald had detested the ‘long-drawn-out amusements enforced on me by my social position’.
When he was young, Gerald loved creating toy theatres, but he specified that he was ‘more interested in the pageantry of fairyland than in the personality of its inhabitants . . . Rapunzel remained a vague and hazy figure while I could visualise clearly the tower from which she let down her hair.’ He later admitted that ‘A pretty house has the same effect on me as the sight of a pretty woman on the majority of people. Without any definite hopes or intention of acquisition, I like to have a good look at it.’ This appreciation of place and ornamentation began early – Gerald decorated his room at Eton with fashionable Japanese fans and a large coloured photograph of a wisteria-covered tearoom – and it continued throughout his life. He was drawn to establishing spectacularly lovely and remarkable homes, the three main ones being in London, Faringdon and Rome. They were among his great creative works, comparable to his painting or writing, and he took pains to achieve the perfect mise-en-scène for himself and his favoured guests, who became the actors in Gerald’s clever, stylish ‘productions’. These homes were all extensions of the man – marvellous places to which he was deeply connected and which he filled with an idiosyncratic mix of art and antiques, books and music, flowers and birds, and the best possible food. And when he could add something startling or surreal – a horse in the drawing room or guests dressed up as statues – so much the better.
GERALD AGED FIVE , 1889
Gerald’s love of the aesthetically pleasing was dominated by the visual element, and yet his great passion was to be music. However, ‘even to music I was at first attracted by its graphic symbolisation . . . My imagination was strangely moved by the sight of these black waves of notes undulating across the pages.’20 As a young child, he quickly began to write imitation cadenzas on the page, creating make-believe music. His description of how he was first attracted to the aural charms of music is unusually precise. When a young female visitor played the piano, the romantic strains of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu ‘burst like a rocket in my imagination’. It was the beginning of a devotion that lasted all his life. The small boy tried to pick out the notes of the dauntingly fast piece and became fixated on it. Later, he was allowed to play the uncared-for upright piano in the billiard room – a gloomy, cold place away from the main house that ‘bristled with antlers, wart-hogs, elephant tusks’ and various barbarous weapons. Hardly the scenery this sensitive child would have chosen for his conversion to musician, but remote enough to give him the privacy he always appreciated.
For many years, Gerald remained largely self-taught as a pianist and he describes how his mother’s reaction to his ‘unexpected penchant for music’ was ‘an attitude of alarm, tempered with pride’. She was pleased enough to make him play to visitors, but his talent was not nurtured. Later, at prep school and then Eton, he was allowed lessons, but he felt the permission was given grudgingly and that his tuition was never enough to allow him to become a seriously trained pianist. At Eton, the older boys encouraged him to play light music at little private evening concerts, and his love of Chopin was replaced with a feverish passion for Wagner. Again, he recalled that it was the visual sense that came first; merely seeing the vocal score of Das Rheingold in a shop window made his heart beat furiously, while some years later, the sighting of a Richard Strauss score was as exciting as ‘meeting the beloved one at a street corner’.21 After much waiting, Gerald persuaded his father to buy the expensive item for him, and The Rhine Gold transported the teenager into his own Wagnerian legend. He would play the music every evening on the dining-room piano at school and his fervour for Wagner lasted many years. However, it was only after he had left school and was able to make more decisions for himself that he was able to pursue music more seriously.
N SPITE OF his many advantages in life, Gerald was dogged from a young age by melancholy. Those who claimed that their childhood days were the best of their lives he suspected of having been particularly unfortunate later on, and he made it clear that he was not in that category: ‘black care can sit behind us even on our rocking-horses.’22 To an extent this was inherent in his character, and it appears that he was prone to misery as a child. However, it was also provoked by his experiences at school. At the age of nine, Gerald was sent to Cheam, a prep school to which his father and other male relations had preceded him. It is easy to believe Gerald’s description of Cheam’s horrible food, the lack of interest in the arts, and compulsory games. This was bad enough for a sensitive, creative, solitary child who didn’t like sports. Worse, the headmaster was a sadist who terrorised the boys with caning and threats. Gerald’s ironic depiction of the situation doesn’t hide the fact that the psychological wounds never entirely closed. ‘Nobody will deny that the majority of small boys between the ages of nine and fourteen are horrid little beasts and deserve to be frightened and bullied. But I find it di
fficult to believe that it is necessary for them to be tortured and terrorised to the extent that we were tortured and terrorised by Mr Gambril.’23
One punishment was recalled as even worse than the agony of the long wait before being caned. Gerald had thrown a copy of the Bible across the room for a bet with another boy that the irreverent act would not bring forth the wrath of God. Unfortunately, the headmaster entered the class just as ‘God’s Sacred Book’ was hurtling through the air and Gerald saw it land at his feet. The punishment was peculiar but effective. Mr Gambril ordered all the boys in the class to hiss at the culprit. ‘Surrounded, as it were by a roomful of infuriated vipers, it seemed to be the most terrible thing that had ever happened to anyone, and the suggestion of mass-hatred in a peculiarly venomous shape intensified my sense of guilt.’ A beating was to follow, but it was the dreadful experience of ostracism that remained.
Later, at Eton, he was rejected by the boys in his house and the ‘long hours of enforced solitude, spent in my room within earshot of the noisy companionship from which I was debarred brought with them an intolerable sense of inferiority and loneliness’.24 The teenager was only too aware of his shortcomings and later wrote about how he developed a technique of self-preservation – ‘the mixture of bluff and cunning that enables the physically weak to steer their way through dangers and difficulties’.
If Gerald felt wretched and isolated at school, he also experienced love. The first object of his desire was at prep school – a boy as different from him as he could imagine. Longworth was a tall, athletic, fair-haired youth, several years older. Captain of the 2nd XI, ‘he seemed to me to embody every possible perfection’, and it was his image that Gerald conjured in Greek lessons when learning about Homeric demigods. This yearning for someone apparently unattainable, combined with a deep appreciation of beauty, was to continue in Gerald’s life.25 Forty years later, the Mad Boy was just as unlikely and handsome a love, who would never be an equal soulmate and partner, and who had a way of keeping Gerald in a state of insecurity.
The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Page 3