The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me

by Sofka Zinovieff

  ALGY, CYRIL, ROBERT AND ALAN

  Although the estate at Hodnet was a boys’ heaven, the Heber-Percy parents were both severe in their dedication to tradition and regimentation. The morning began for all members of the household (including the servants and any guests) with prayers in the dining room. They were announced by Whitaker, the butler, who was a dab hand with the gong and made it resound in a crescendo around the house. Daddy read from the Bible and led the service. As they grew older, the boys found it an ideal opportunity to get a good look at any new or pretty housemaids, but once, after they succeeded in making a new maid giggle with their stares, Algy was flogged by his father and the younger boys were sent to their rooms without breakfast. According to Robert, his father would come into the bathroom when the boys were in the bath and lash out at them with a hunting crop. What this was for is not recorded, but certainly they were naughty, and cooked up mischievous schemes like hiding in the housemaids’ cupboard to spy on their fat, whiskery governess as she bathed.

  Despite his temper, Robert’s father was also distant and uninterested – something that was exacerbated by his physical frailty. Cyril recalled that each evening the young boys were dolled up ‘like Little Lord Fauntleroys’ in frilled white shirts, dark velvet shorts, white socks and shiny buckled shoes and led by Nannie Jones into the library for an audience with their parents and any guests staying in the house. However, ‘Daddy took little part in our amusements as he suffered from asthma. But occasionally he would recite Hiawatha, or continue a never-ending story about a Mr Snodgrass. He was a good story-teller. Usually he tired of the noise all too quickly, and would pull the bell-rope beside the fireplace several times to summon a footman, who would enter immediately, dressed in blue tailcoat with silver-crested buttons, and a blue-and-yellow striped waistcoat. ‘“Fetch Nannie,” Daddy would say. “Sir.” The door closed quietly. There would be a kiss for Daddy and Mummy, perhaps a reluctant peck at an aunt and a handshake for anyone else.’80

  Religion didn’t end with morning prayers; on Sundays the boys were trussed up in their best blue suits and caps before they trooped down the drive to the village church. The graveyard was filled with Heber-Percy tombs, and inside, the front two pews belonged to the Lords of the Manor of Hodnet. From the padded seats that were the squire’s privilege, they could look across at the Victorian stained-glass window donated by their predecessors and the Heber-Percy chapel to the side. Hymns were sung, some of which were written by their illustrious ancestor Bishop Heber of Calcutta. A famous missionary who worked and died in India in the 1820s, Bishop Heber had been a brilliant young fellow of All Souls, Oxford. As vicar of Hodnet, he composed as he strolled around the grounds, leaving behind him many popular hymns, such as ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’ and the missionaries’ favourite, ‘From Greenland’s Icy Mountains’.

  During Robert’s childhood, the house was almost teetotal. Even in the era of cocktails (‘gut-rotting, a pernicious concoction’), Daddy only allowed a bit of sherry and port for guests and the whisky was kept locked up. Food was not adventurous but plentiful – especially breakfast, as Cyril’s descriptions indicate.

  There were several hot dishes, always one of fish, eggs of one kind or another, thin crisp bacon – it had to break with the touch of a knife – and kidneys on toast with parsley butter, or home-made sausages, all in separate silver dishes. A ham on the sideboard . . . There would also be a large dish of cold partridge or pheasant when in season, a tongue, hot scones, toast, butter in small round pats and a flat glass dish of thick scalded cream, home-made marmalade, honey in the comb, and two sorts of jam.81

  The boys had to eat this bounty in silence unless spoken to and, vocally critical of his sons’ table manners, Daddy liked to sneak up if they had their elbows on the table and knock them off.

  HE FIRST WORLD WAR broke out when Robert was three. His brothers were all away at preparatory schools by then, and Gladys opened up the house as a convalescent hospital with eighty beds. As ‘commandant’, she ‘ruled with a rod of iron’ and terrorised the patients and staff. Her husband was the recruiting officer for the district and travelled around in his Renault, a temperamental automobile that needed endless cranking to start and stalled on hills. Algernon took to treating it like the horses he knew much better, reining back on the steering wheel and murmuring ‘Whoa’ when he wanted to stop.82

  Although his three brothers returned during holidays (the soldiers would give them surreptitious puffs on Woodbines if they were lucky), Robert was inevitably alone much more than before. With many of the male staff gone to fight and his parents extremely busy, the war gave Robert much more freedom and possibly neglect than before. It was easy for him to wander around the house, past the rows of taxidermists’ glass eyes staring out from the walls and the distant gazes in the endless family portraits: Vernons, Hebers, Percys, a sixteenth-century countess, a bishop in his robes. One charming, full-length likeness depicted a flowing-haired young man holding a cricket bat – Richard Heber, the celebrated book collector who amassed over 150,000 volumes. He was, as the current Algy put it, ‘more inclined to the males’, though this would surely not have been spoken of by Robert’s parents. Despite being the brother of the Calcutta bishop, Richard’s good looks, intellect and charm could not save him when, at the age of fifty-two, he became involved with a twenty-three-year-old man. He was forced abroad and, when he returned to England, was ostracised by society, dying alone in 1835.

  Despite his tricks and mischief, Robert showed a degree of sensitivity compared to his siblings. He didn’t enjoy shooting or fishing like them, and Cyril recalled that he read and painted – apparently unusual pastimes in the family, despite their illustrious bibliophile ancestor and the library that was packed from floor to ceiling with books. Robert liked to pick bunches of flowers for his mother and visited her in her huge study on the first floor that looked out over the gardens and the lake to the undulating fields, where cows grazed by the sixteenth-century dovecot. Although Cyril claimed that his mother never showed that Robert was ‘Mummy’s darling’, Robert himself recalled little secrets between them. When his mother returned to Hodnet from London and her youngest boy was asleep in bed, she would place a small bottle of scent under his pillow.83 It is unclear whether this was a sign or a present, a phial of her own scent or some cologne for him, but it was clearly a small intimacy – unusual and delicate in the tough, physical environment where horse tackle and terriers, ferrets and pheasant shoots usually counted for more.

  Hodnet was a version of Eden to Robert, yet he was surely aware from a young age that it was one from which he would be cast out. With so much emphasis on the line of inheritance and on preserving family names and traditions, he would have known early on that his eldest brother Algy would get everything. ‘As a younger son, you are very low in the pecking order,’ said Algy, Robert’s nephew. ‘If you’re the youngest son, you know you are never going to inherit.’ Given three older brothers, it was clear that Robert could envisage no future in the place that meant everything to his family. With the English system of primogeniture and ‘the strict settlement of estates’, the winner would take it all. And the same went for titles. As Nancy Mitford pointed out, ‘The rule of primogeniture has kept together the huge fortunes of English lords; it has also formed our class system.’84 It is the great distinction between the English aristocracy and any other; whereas abroad every member of a noble family is noble, in England none is except the head of the family. The sons and daughters may enjoy courtesy titles but as a rule the younger offspring of even the richest lords receive comparatively little money. Younger sons have thus habitually been left without money, property or title, often without the skills to acquire them and, above all, without belonging to the place they care most about. As clergymen, soldiers, sailors and resentful ne’er-do-wells, these high-born outcasts litter the pages of nineteenth-century English novels, with their hopeless attempts to make a way in the unfriendly world and their irresponsible sprees of adven
turing.

  Many of Robert’s characteristics were formed by the early knowledge of his place in this scheme and the family hierarchy. Like all the Heber-Percys, he had an intense love of country life, but in becoming a daring show-off, he was demanding attention that was otherwise given elsewhere. A trickster and game-player, he lured people into giving him what he wanted. Easily bored, yet sensitive, he needed a protector who could care for him and get him out of trouble.

  HEN ROBERT WAS THIRTEEN, a decision had to be made about his schooling. His older brothers had failed to get into Eton and ended up going to Harrow. Gladys was worried that her youngest child would not be able to follow in their footsteps. He was already renowned for his bad behaviour at Wixenford in Wokingham (a school that advertised itself as being for ‘the sons of gentlemen and minor princes’). A couple of months before Robert was due to sit the exam for Eton, she approached a new school that must have seemed rather a novelty. Stowe was well known for its extraordinary gardens, landscaped in the eighteenth century into an Arcadian vision, complete with a triumphal arch, a Palladian bridge and any number of temples, sculptures and grottoes. The magnificent house had been sold and, in 1923, became a boarding school for ninety-nine teenage boys. Gladys wrote a somewhat grovelling letter to the bursar, revealing her anxieties about her undisciplined favourite. In the event, Stowe was desperate to recruit new pupils and Robert arrived in the summer term of 1925 – an exact contemporary of David Niven, who was already a popular boy, and whose talent for drawing sketches and caricatures amused his classmates. The two would meet again during the war under very different circumstances, but no evidence suggests they were friends at school.

  There is a portrait of Robert at Faringdon that must have been painted at about the time he went to Stowe – a sugary confection that exaggerates his round brown eyes, bee-stung lips, high rosy cheekbones and golden-chestnut locks. A frilly-collared shirt completes the picture. He looks like the sort of new arrival the older boys would have pounced on, but from all accounts Robert was no victim. Accustomed to fending for himself in a large family with big brothers, he had no qualms about behaving just as he had at home, with jokes and an uninhibited air of je m’en fous. Only a year after he arrived, Robert’s tutor wrote to Gladys, admitting that he had ‘been thinking a great deal about Robert recently’. Young Heber-Percy had evidently been behaving badly and the family was already contemplating removing him, something the tutor warned against

  [as] one of the most unfortunate things that could happen to him . . . Mr Playford [his teacher] says that Robert is childish; that he asks foolish questions; that he does not retain even for a few moments what he has been told; and that he appears quite unashamed by public opinion, even when his failings do not pass un-noticed by the rest of the form; and from my own experience I am sure that all these indictments are true.

  In the House, too, he is so casual that he cannot be regarded otherwise than as a weak spot.

  However, in conjunction with all these, the fact that he has not as yet begun to develop must, in fairness, not be overlooked; nor must his praiseworthy efforts at improvement, which I am certain are genuine, even if spasmodic and undisciplined, be ignored.

  Robert remembered his schooldays with affection and sometimes went back to visit. He also held fond memories of the legendary headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh (known as J.F.), who was unusually youthful and curiously humanitarian for someone in his position. Tall and well-built, J.F. was something of an intellectual dandy, but he was dedicated to his pupils who remembered him as a ‘magnetically brilliant teacher to generations of boys’.85 Evelyn Waugh, who was taught by J.F. at Lancing, described his sonorous voice as like ‘a hot potato in the mouth’, but also alleged that he had been caught in flagrante with a boy.86 Roxburgh apparently allowed the boys to keep pets, something which escalated into a badly run zoo as boys grew out of rabbits and ferrets and allegedly acquired monkeys, bears and hyenas; it was eventually shut down.87

  However, even J.F. found Robert a tricky proposition. In one report he wrote: ‘He is a problem. Some people can’t succeed, but he can’t try – at least not for any length of time.’ But J.F. was nothing if not an optimist, adding, ‘Personally, I don’t a bit despair of him, and I know that he has many virtues which will come out later, but I doubt if he will ever make any progress at school – probably not till he is about eighteen.’

  Robert didn’t make it to eighteen at Stowe, leaving for a crammer in Westgate-on-Sea in Kent when he was still sixteen. J.F. wrote to the director, urging him to take the boy and trying to mix honesty with hopefulness:

  Robert Heber-Percy is a delightful youth. Personally I have always been much attached to him, though he was at one time in a mild way something of a law breaker. Latterly he has enormously improved, and there has never been anything of the slightest seriousness against him. His great failing is that he cannot concentrate, and when he tries to do so for any time, or when he gets ill or tired, fatigue appears to make his mind go perfectly blank at intervals. You will find his work startlingly bad, but I shall be greatly surprised if you do not like the boy himself. Do take him if you can.

  We don’t know how long Robert stayed at the seaside crammer or what he got up to when he left. The three options listed by Stowe as ‘possible career’ when Gladys registered her son looked increasingly unlikely: 1. The University, 2. The Army or Navy, 3. The Medical Profession. To her credit, Gladys had even then written ‘not settled’. Now, for this devilishly good-looking youth who took nothing seriously, matters looked even less settled. Sadly, there are no diaries or letters relating to this period of Robert’s life; he was far too busy with escapades and adventures to write about them and putting pen to paper was never his strong point. He evidently started to spend a good deal of time in London, where life for a teenage ‘mad boy’ offered endless parties and the sparkling nightclubs that had opened up during the 1920s. Cyril recalled various of the madcap schemes that took place after his youngest brother left school and before he met Gerald Berners:

  He went abroad, here, there and everywhere. He worked his passage to America, where amongst other things, he acted as an extra in Hollywood and had a stand-in part falling off a horse at full gallop. He was a waiter at a Lyons Corner House, but was sacked for spilling soup all over a customer. Robert said, ‘The man just complained too much.’88

  Robert’s older brothers had already pursued more conventional paths in the Army: Algy left Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, Cyril joined the Welsh Guards and Alan the Royal Scots Greys. Algy was the only one to stick with the military; Cyril had his heart with the horses and eventually left to become master and huntsman of a pack of hounds. Alan, like Robert, preferred dash and speed to discipline and duty. He bought a racehorse, drove fast cars and had a couple of black Alsatians, one of which had been trained as a police dog in Germany. He eventually gave them to Cyril, who took them everywhere, even to London on leave, where they could be relied upon to behave themselves in the theatre and tackle an enemy if necessary.

  ROBERT’S BROTHERS CYRIL AND ALAN, CHANGING THE GUARD AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE, 1927

  In March 1931, when Robert was nineteen, he tried to do the right thing and joined the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards, a cavalry regiment established in the seventeenth century and based in Tidworth, on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Becoming a Guards officer was a well-trodden path for young men of his background, few of whom would end up as professional soldiers. There were all the trappings of an exclusive club – fancy, colourful uniforms and a variety of arcane rituals – and officers were given enough leave to allow a social life in London, albeit with rules about what they wore and carried: dark suits and bowler hats were de rigueur, a stick or umbrella was suggested, and parcels or a suitcase were forbidden.

  Joining the Guards was the perfect occupation for the decorative, sociable male that Martin Green designated ‘the Dandy’ in his influential study of the post-war generation, Children of the Sun. Preoc
cupied with style, ornament and high manners, the dandy rejects the parents’ seriousness and is ‘dedicated solely to his own perfection through a ritual of taste’. At the root of the early twentieth-century cult of the dandy ‘is the worship of the male adolescent by older men as expressed in the myths of Narcissus and Adonis’.89 In the wake of the First World War, the circumstances were perfect for the expansion of this cult. The older generation appeared tainted with the blood of the golden youth: young men like Rupert Brooke, who had been sent to the slaughter by old men who were still alive. Elizabeth Bowen described this generation that grew up just after the First World War as one which was ‘made to feel it had muffed the catch’, but the other way of seeing it was that of Cyril Connolly: ‘In those days whenever you didn’t get on with your father, you had all the glorious dead on your side.’

  Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, the pursuit of pleasure and beauty seemed some sort of reaction to the horrors of what had gone before. With a generation of young men wiped out, there is an easy psychoanalytical theory for the subsequent emphasis on masculine charms, and why it was that girls shingled their hair in short bobs and flattened their chests for flapper dresses. The excesses of partying – dressing up in costumes, drinking too much and ending up with unlikely bed partners – were methods of rejecting both the past and one’s elders. And Robert was a perfect candidate for this existence.