Gerald became close to both Winnie and Violet, and saw them at the princess’s palazzo in Venice, where there was ‘mad and constant music-making’ and visits from Stravinsky, Cole Porter, Arthur Rubinstein and Diaghilev.65 The tall American-born French princess and the short cosmopolitan English lord had more in common than might have been initially apparent and their interest in one another and in music developed into a lifelong friendship. Both were eccentric outsiders who managed to be at the centre of things, and though they were gay at a time when this was not widely acceptable, they were socially desirable because of their titles and their wealth. Above all, their love of music was the centre of their lives. There is an argument that music can be considered a conduit for ambiguous feelings that are ‘different, irrational, unaccountable’, and that it can provide the ‘perfect field for the display of emotion’ for those who have difficulty in expressing it or for whom there is disapproval.66 Although this is speculative, it is an interesting theory that makes some sense in both cases.
If Gerald did not openly declare himself as homosexual and did not leave any evidence behind of relationships with men at this stage in his life, he did have many friends whose sexual preferences were more obviously expressed. Diaghilev was a significant lodestar for numerous men of similar inclinations – a powerful, successful artist who didn’t hide his attraction to and liaisons with men. Another overtly gay friend was the young painter Christopher (‘Kit’) Wood, who had sat at the feet of Picasso in Paris and who took advice and opium from Cocteau. Gerald bought one of Wood’s paintings, and saw him again in Rome, where they enjoyed ‘painting trips . . . picnics, parties and dinners’ and met frequently with Igor Stravinsky and the Marchesa Casati.67 Kit Wood’s pale good looks, his sexually ambiguous style (he also got involved with women), his polio-induced limp and his fierce dedication to his painting made him hugely attractive to many people, including Gerald. ‘He was a painter who was at the same time naive and sophisticated. He saw directly with the eyes of a primitive and had that primitive sense of pure colour and elimination of the unnecessary,’ wrote their mutual friend, the painter Francis Rose.68 When Gerald wrote ‘a fantastic ballet in one act’, Luna Park – set in the freaks pavilion of a fairground and choreographed once more by Balanchine – it was Wood who designed the scenery and costumes for the show. The ballet was performed in 1930, the year the twenty-nine-year-old Wood, after a frenzied summer of painting and opium abuse, threw himself under a train.
It seems likely that Gerald introduced the young Kit Wood to Ronald Firbank in Rome. Tall, skinny, with white hands sporting long, carmine-coloured nails and Egyptian rings, Firbank stayed a good deal in Rome in the early 1920s, and constructed and cultivated even more masks and mysteries around himself than Gerald. His novels had already caused a stir, with their modern mix of unconventional sexuality, wittily malicious satire and experimental form, and while he often had to publish his own books, he is viewed by some as having written some of the most original fiction of the twentieth century.69 Certainly his works were adored by the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and would continue to occupy a place in many of their hearts after they stopped being bright or young.
Gerald had become friends with Firbank during the strange, disorienting years after the war, when strikes, shortages and the ravages of the dreadful flu epidemic were ameliorated by the joys of Mediterranean life. Both men had found a refuge from the stifling restrictions of English society, culture and climate in travel and art and both were shy, clever, sensitive and sexually diffident. They met at the Ballets Russes, where the audience was understandably nonplussed by the lanky aesthete, whose favourite posture ‘seemed to entail sitting with his head nearly touching the floor and with his feet in the air’.70 Initially, Gerald found this degree of eccentricity embarrassing. Although he was three years older than Firbank, he did not embrace the decadent, lily-scented style redolent of the fin de siècle, Yellow Book days of Beardsley and Wilde. Firbank also drank too much and didn’t always eat properly – when others ordered a meal, he might consume only peaches washed down with champagne.
Where Firbank was isolated and felt himself almost a social outcast, Gerald liked to be embraced by the society he also mocked, and was often surprisingly conventional in appearance and manners for someone known for eccentricity; he favoured a bowler hat and snug suits. Firbank, with his absurd behaviour, undulating walk and lonely isolation, might have seemed a warning to Gerald of the perils of taking unconventionality too far – a reflection in a warped mirror of his own characteristics. Firbank was not entirely devoted to Gerald, writing scathingly about Berners and ‘the Sitwell set’, whom he believed to be ‘afraid of my “witty” pen!’ In a letter to his mother, he compared Gerald to a great-uncle, ‘only less distinguished! For his face has no cleverness to redeem it! He is fat and rather bald, but with a pleasant manner, although under the “flabbyness” of the surface there is certainly steel! He might be an unpleasant enemy, and he is, of course, not at all simple.’71
By the time Firbank died of alcohol and lung disease in 1926, aged forty, Gerald claimed to be his only friend in Rome; in charge of the funeral, he managed to make the kind of mistake that could have occurred in either man’s novels. Having misinterpreted Firbank’s disparaging remarks about the prejudices of the Catholic Church, Gerald had him buried in the verdant Protestant Cemetery behind the Pyramid of Cestius, where Shelley and Keats ended up. It was subsequently revealed that Firbank was a Roman Catholic and he was disinterred, but Gerald recalled the ‘mistaken’ burial on a summer morning with wry pleasure. Amid the cypresses and roses were nightingales ‘whose vocal outpourings in Italy are not confined, as in Northern countries, to moonlit groves . . . The nightingales that attended Ronald’s funeral were presumably Papists, for they did their utmost to drown the voice of the officiating clergyman.’72
HE YEAR 1931 might have looked unpromising to Gerald. Heading for fifty, he couldn’t fail to notice the banking crisis that was leading inexorably to the Great Depression. Severe unemployment and a Labour government were hardly encouraging to the post-war era of excess, jazz clubs and fancy-dress parties so well satirised by Evelyn Waugh. In February, Gerald’s seventy-nine-year-old mother Julia died. He was soon to write his first memoir, First Childhood, in which she would be caricatured as a hard-nosed yet parochial, country lady. These were some of the childhood feelings he retained and now felt free to express, but in reality Gerald was a loved and loyal son. His letters to his mother were warm and regular and he often visited, bringing friends with him for country weekends. He even had his own set of rooms at Faringdon, on the lower ground floor, where he worked.
Siegfried Sassoon’s diary describes a stay at Faringdon in the 1920s: ‘B’s mother is a vague agreeable lady beautifully draped in old lace; probably a keen gardener; the drawing-room is full of freesias, and they are thinking of getting a new troop of goldfish for the lily-pond. In the dining-room are two glossy blue starlings in separate cages.’ Colonel Ward Bennitt’s ageing parrot, bought off a sailor many years before, was taken out for a bit of sunshine by the limestone pillars on the porch. It was presumably with this bird that Gerald tried to play tricks on his mother, persuading it to walk across the floor covered with a bowler hat. ‘This strange sight of a self-moving hat didn’t seem to surprise Gerald’s mother, which did surprise Gerald: perhaps Gerald wasn’t aware how well, even in old age, Gerald’s mother understood her son.’73 This was the woman, after all, who had welcomed the Marchesa Casati into her home when Gerald invited his Italian friend to stay, and was charmed. Despite the unusual appearance of the grandly eccentric Casati – unusually tall and slender, smoking cigarettes from a long, jewelled holder and sporting false lashes and tight, white satin trousers – Mrs Ward Bennitt later announced, ‘I like her much better than your other foreign friends.’74 Naturally, La Casati brought her python. Or was it an immense boa constrictor, as Osbert Sitwell remembered, packaged up in a large portmanteau with a glass top
? ‘It was neatly coiled for its journey, but showing that it was alive by an occasional glistening shudder of its scaly skin.’75 Even this was accepted by Gerald’s mother. Apparently the hostess asked the Marchesa if her pet was hungry. ‘No, it had a goat this morning.’76 The Italian signed herself in the visitors’ book (an old hotel register) as ‘Tempteuse de Serpents’.
JULIA, GERALD’S MOTHER, SITS ON THE STEPS. HER SECOND HUSBAND, COLONEL WARD BENNITT, SITS ON THE WALL SMOKING A PIPE, HIS SAILOR’S PARROT TAKING THE AIR. THE LADY ON THE RIGHT CANNOT BE IDENTIFIED
Julia’s death was followed only three weeks later by her husband’s, the now ninety-three-year-old Colonel. Both were among the first people to be cremated at Oxford’s new crematorium and their tombstones are in the graveyard of Faringdon’s All Saints’ Church, just beyond the garden wall. Gerald decided to take over Faringdon as his own home (not relinquishing his others in London and Rome) and, freed from the beady maternal eye, the subsequent year would be a time of revealing and marvellous changes.
* Their son, Peter Rodd, would later marry Nancy Mitford.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Delightful Youth
F GERALD AND THE MAD BOY were dramatically different in terms of appearance, age and character, their backgrounds were remarkably similar. Hodnet Hall, the home of the Heber-Percys, was only eleven miles from Apley Park, and both families were wealthy Shropshire landowners who might easily have visited one another’s houses or ridden to hounds together. Though Robert was born twenty-eight years after Gerald, both experienced the same mixture of privilege and neglect as children, and both lived in households where horses were assumed to be as fundamental a species in daily life as humans. Throughout their lives, both retained a love of the rural English landscape, but they rejected the asphyxiating conventions of their childhoods and had a predilection for shocking the kind of people they had grown up with. They had different methods of achieving it, but in each case, épater le bourgeois was almost a creed.
Robert Vernon Heber-Percy was born on Guy Fawkes Day 1911. It is not recorded whether his mother was disappointed to have a fourth son, but she was a practical, no-nonsense sort of person who would not have made a fuss. By the time of his birth, Robert’s older brothers were already of an age to be off by themselves, playing in the vast gardens of Hodnet Hall, but they were surely brought in by ‘dear old Nannie Jones’ and Dorothy Dodd the nursemaid to visit the new baby. The oldest brother, Algernon, was nine and the presumed heir to the estate. He was known as Algy, like so many of his forebears. (The family’s ancestry could be traced all the way back to William de Percy, who came over with William the Conqueror and who had such fine moustaches that he was known as aux or als gernons, ‘with the whiskers’.) The next was Cyril, who at seven was already a fanatical animal-lover, and, two years younger, Alan, who like Robert would turn out wild, unpredictable and dashingly attractive.
Their mother Gladys was by all accounts a dauntingly tough character, though early photographs indicate a classic Edwardian beauty with milky-skinned, sloping shoulders and lazy-lidded eyes. A strong nose and chin add a hint of the determination for which she was famed. Gladys was an elegant and gracious hostess in her evening dress and diamond tiara for the yearly hunt ball, but she was much happier on a horse. A brilliant rider who could break in the most troublesome young animals and who led the hunts that often met at Hodnet Hall, she rode an elegant side-saddle even in her old age. In pictures, she sits serious and poker-backed in her meticulous riding habit: glistening black boots and top hat and bright white gloves and stock. Gladys claimed happily to have survived numerous injuries from falls, and her reaction was no less carefree when her sons fell from their ponies. Once, a nanny took three of the young boys out for a ride, placing them in basket panniers, but the girths broke and the screaming children tumbled into a ditch. While the nanny was very distressed by the accident, Gladys showed no anxiety about the state of her offspring and merely laughed.77
The boys’ father, another Algernon, was a semi-invalid, weakened by asthma and plagued by eczema to such a degree that he often had to be wrapped up in linen cloths to protect his flaking skin. Yet even he was more interested in his horses and dogs than in his children. A remote figure who criticised and scolded more than he encouraged, his greatest legacy to his sons was fostering a deep love and knowledge of estate life. His own parents had a large steam yacht, travelled extensively and were just as at home in London as at Hodnet, whereas Gladys’s family, the Hulton-Harrops, were solid Shropshire gentry who tended not to stray too far from their estate. Nevertheless, Gladys proved to be the ideal partner in managing Hodnet. According to Us Four, the memoir by Robert’s brother Cyril, ‘Mummy ran the house, gardens, stables, and all of us,’ giving instructions to each of the heads of departments: menus for the cook; lists of stores from Harrods that needed replenishing; orders for a sheep to be slaughtered or bacon cured; the stud-groom told which horses were required for riding or for breaking in; the head housemaid informed which rooms to prepare for guests; and the head gardener given requests for flowers, fruits and vegetables. Daddy, on the other hand, ‘ran the estate through his agent, but what the agent told the men was often countermanded later in the day as Daddy rode round’.78
Hodnet Hall was a great rambling place of red sandstone and brick, with seventy-two rooms, enormous kitchens, a brewery, a dairy, a bakery and a laundry, not to mention extensive stables, kennels, a walled kitchen garden and a Home Farm. An Elizabethan-style great hall ran almost the whole length of the house and was filled with a terrifying array of stuffed animals. This included not just the normal range of heads severed from deer, foxes and other British fauna, but bounty from the big-game hunters among the Heber-Percys, who returned from their travels with lions, tigers, zebras, bison and even a baboon, which were duly dealt with and put on display. (Gerald would visit Hodnet only once; according to Heber-Percy lore, when he saw this phantasmagoria of taxidermy he had to be given smelling salts.)
Although the house was a Victorian pastiche designed by Salvin and finished in 1871, it was the third manor house built on one of the very few estates in England that have never been bought or sold. Related to the dukes of Northumberland, the family had lived there since 1200; the original half-timbered building was constructed in 1264. By occasionally allowing females to inherit, they claimed descent from the Norman lords of Vernon, and Odo of Hodnet, one of the Shropshire Knights. The motto on the coat of arms, with its Percy lion and Heber maiden, is Esperance en Dieu (‘Hope in God’), but the old butler used to say that such was the family’s sense of place and history, it should have been ‘What I Have I Hold’.
In the 1960s, Hodnet Hall had its second floor, a wing, and the tower bearing the family’s standard pulled down to make it more economically viable. The great hall was removed, the rooms reduced to about thirty-five, and the extensive old kitchens turned into garages. However, the essence of the place remains much the same, now cared for by another Algy – eldest son of Robert’s eldest brother. You can tell by looking at the photograph albums that they nearly all retain the same lean, almost boyish frame throughout their lives, as Robert did too. And it is apparent that the latest Algy’s dedication to Hodnet is just as strong as it was for his predecessors over so many centuries. He even has the same varieties of much-loved dogs that scamper in blurs across the Edwardian and Victorian photographs – Labradors and terriers. The gardens are still tended to the remarkable standards that the current Algy’s grandfather and father kept them, and though thousands of visitors now walk around them each year, they continue to reflect the traditions and taste of the family. Tree-shaded driveways lead past perfectly clipped lawns and rose gardens, and paths lined by rhododendrons and camellias meander alongside a chain of ambitious cascading water gardens that were created by Robert’s brother in the 1920s. The stuffed animals from the old hall, including a moth-eaten lion, were moved to the stables, now converted into a visitors’ restaurant.
‘By
the time Robert came along, the parents had rather given up,’ said Algy, remembering stories about his Mad Boy uncle. ‘Nursery life had gone on so long and they’d said “No” so often. Nannie was retiring soon . . . so they probably said, “Come down for dinner” much sooner than they had with their other sons. Gladys was quite a harsh mother, but she spoilt Robert, and dressed him up as a girl. He was allowed to get away with things.’ To what extent Gladys cross-dressed her youngest son is not known, and though there is a studio photograph of the four brothers where the oldest three are in short-trousered suits and ties and a two-year-old Robert wears a white pinafore, this sort of outfit was not unusual at the time.
There were tutors and governesses to give lessons up in the nursery and schoolrooms on the top floor. Footmen trudged up the seventy-odd steps from the kitchens to bring trays with the children’s meals. None of the boys was particularly interested in their formal education and the focus at home was clearly on country pursuits, for which they were given a good deal of freedom. Cyril remembered Robert learning very quickly to stand up for himself. ‘He was full of fun, up to every prank, could hoodwink most people, and developed a gift for repartee.’ He was soon following his older brothers around in the grounds, tree-climbing, bird-nesting, or running down to the stables to ride. A favourite route was through the woods to the gamekeeper’s hut, with its cages of stinking white ferrets and polecats. The gamekeeper, Holding, a tall ex-Coldstream sergeant, kept a macabre exhibition of dead animals he considered vermin. ‘Strung on wire between two trees hung magpies, jays, crows, hawks, and a long row of stoats. Some had fallen to the ground rotten; others were skeletons except for their black-tipped tails. They were all maggoty; bluebottles buzzed around them.’79
The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Page 6