‘WHO’S THAT GIRL?’ ASKED PENELOPE BETJEMAN OF CLARISSA CHURCHILL, HERE POSING UNDER GERALD’S INSTRUCTION AS A STATUE IN A NICHE
Gerald was still gloomy about the war, but from late 1940, he gradually emerged out of his depression and started having weekends back at Faringdon. He bought antiques from Mr John’s shop by All Souls in Oxford – Dresden vases with parrots and flowers, silver-gilt owls, cockerels and fish, that eventually decorated his home.318 David Cecil recalled them reading aloud to each other what they’d been writing and how Gerald was very much part of the ‘odd little enclave of society’ that had grown up in Oxford since the start of the war. Although Gerald was not a talker in the expansive intellectual tradition, he was appreciated by many of those who were, including the brilliant Isaiah Berlin.319
Clarissa returned to London in the spring of 1941 to work in the Foreign Office, but she remained Gerald’s favourite guest and there are numerous letters from the ageing man to the young woman, begging her to take the train from London to Faringdon again as soon as possible. ‘My dear Clarissa . . . It is heartbreaking to think of you in the catacombs of the Foreign Office with your debutantes and your lentils, blown along the corridors by the blast, together with Lady Colefax like people in Dante’s Inferno, instead of being here with us in the City of the Dreaming Dons.’
Gerald began coming back to life. In seventeenth-century Oxford, Robert Burton had recommended music as a treatment in his Anatomy of Melancholy and it was this beloved medium that accompanied Gerald’s return from the vortex of ‘black bile’ that had nearly drowned him. There was a piano in his rooms in St Giles’ and Gerald played for himself and the occasional visitor. His old friend Winnie, Princesse de Polignac (one of the many refugees from occupied Paris), passed through Oxford and together they went to Christ Church to hear Thomas Armstrong play the organ. Afterwards, Gerald persuaded Armstrong (later Sir Thomas, principal of the Royal Academy of Music) to give him music-theory lessons, in particular to learn the principles of the Renaissance composer Palestrina. Armstrong was impressed: ‘His was the most alert and far-seeing brain I’ve ever had to do with in music.’320
Despite his finesse in composition, it has been suggested that Gerald’s piano playing was not outstanding, if full of determination and spirit; ‘a cross between Mr Toad on a clear highway and Wanda Landowska [a famous harpsichordist] crashing a water-jump,’ suggested one critic.321 Gerald’s next composition was a two-piano polka for a 1941 Christmas pantomime (Cinderella, or There’s Many a Slipper, performed by the Tynchewycke Society to raise money for the Radcliffe Hospital), for which he also composed one of his best-loved comical songs, ‘Red Roses and Red Noses’.
In addition to composing, Gerald also found the energy to write no fewer than four novels, albeit slim ones. Count Omega is the fantastical story of a young composer (supposedly based partly on William Walton) who becomes obsessed with a youthful giantess, ‘whose virtuosity on a trombone seems to offer the perfect climax to a symphony he is composing’. Mr Pidger tells a darkly comic tale concerning inheritance and the bad behaviour of a spoilt lapdog. The Romance of a Nose is an extraordinary creation about Cleopatra having the world’s first nose job to correct her enormous protuberance. Like all his books, it combines a parodic lightness of touch with dark, sinister elements. Gerald’s research, even for a slight novel like this, was prodigious. His notebooks are filled with musings and precise historical references to ancient Egypt and Greece (‘Thebes, sweet-smelling, medicinal desert plants . . . geese caught by nets or shot with a bow’) and details about Hippocrates, Cicero, Asclepiades and Caesar. The title of his book was not immediately obvious and he tried out a list: ‘A Royal Nose, The Story of a Nose, The Queen’s Nose, A Nose is a Nose [presumably a playful nudge to his friend Gertrude Stein], The End of a Nose, Roman Nose.’ There are little sketches, quotes from Dante, thoughts on music and some botanical notes. Sometimes, there is a page given over to the first line of a story that didn’t get written: ‘Prawling was an old dog who lived in the country . . .’
His next book, Far From the Madding War, is dedicated to David and Rachel Cecil, who had cherished Gerald in his darkest times. The novel is based in Oxford during the war and has a good deal of autobiographical content, featuring Lord FitzCricket, Gerald’s alter ego. The heroine, Miss Emmeline Pocock, is widely believed to be based on Clarissa, though the ironic descriptions of her absurd choice of ‘war work’ are pure fantasy. The academic’s daughter decides to pick apart an immense and valuable German embroidery, with ample breaks for tea, lunch, rests and perusal of The Times. Various other friends make appearances throughout the pages: Harold Nicolson is teased (yet again), appearing as ‘Lollypop’ Jenkins, a politician who makes mock-heroic speeches and tries to maintain his reputation as an enfant terrible. There are also characters apparently based on Penelope Betjeman, Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin.
At last, Gerald was able to put his sadness and frustration into words. Expressing his loathing of war in a poem, ‘The Romantic Charter’, he describes his yearning for the sensuous and aesthetic pleasures that seem to have vanished. Some aspects of the poem might seem elitist, even snobbish, today; housemaids were now working in arms factories or driving ambulances and would never return to domestic service, and dinners ‘all in evening dress’ would dwindle along with Britain’s colonies. Some of Gerald’s rhymes edge towards doggerel, but he meant them. These were the things he loved and desperately missed, and the verses have a freshness and anger that are unlike the light ironies of some of his prose.
I am not fighting for the Poles or Czechs,
And only indirectly for the Rex.
I do not greatly love the Slav or Greek,
I cannot bear the way colonials speak.
I loathe efficiency and Nissen huts,
And as for ‘bonhomie’ I hate its guts.
I am not fighting Germans just to get
My democratic share of ‘blood and sweat’.
Dear Sir,
I feel that you may get the gist
Of all MY War Aims from the following list . . .
. . . Georgian houses, red repliquas of heaven,
Split pediments, breakfast at eleven,
Large white peonies in big glass bowls,
Asparagus au beurre, whitebait in shoals,
Close cropped grass, huge trees and cawing rooks,
A sunny breakfast room, a library with books,
Clean white housemaids in new print frocks,
Coachmen turned chauffeur, footmen on the box.
Dinner parties, all in evening dress,
Glamorous women drenched in Mary Chess
Charades and paper games, hot-houses with the heat on,
Superficiality and Cecil Beaton.
Shrimps from Morecambe Bay, port that is tawny,
Claret and Beaujolais, soles that are Mornay,
Hot scones for tea, thick cream, the smell of logs,
Long country walks, thick shoes and spaniel dogs,
Ducks in the evening, swishing swans in flight,
Fires in bedrooms, flickering at night –
And of those autres fois, all those mœurs
Which are epitomized in ‘Valse des fleurs’ –
Fresh shiny chintzes, an herbaceous border –
Death and destruction to this damned new order.
It was around this time that Gerald took to wearing little knitted skullcaps that some compared to tea cosies, while others noted ‘a somewhat rabbinical design’. The knitter was Marie Beazley, wife of the noted archaeologist and expert on Greek vases, J. D. ‘Jack’ Beazley. Mrs Beazley was a mysterious woman with ‘iridescent blue hair . . . very black oblique eyes, a long Oriental nose and the curved lips of an Archaic goddess’.322 She was Jewish, wore overwhelming eastern perfumes, cooked unfamiliar Levantine dishes with rose petals and pistachios, and played Chopin on the piano with great feeling. Though Harold Acton adored her, Mrs Beazley was to some rather a figure of fun;
such exoticism was a step too far for tweedy Oxford. There was talk of her décolleté, her formidable nose and even a little moustache, not to mention the tame goose that followed her around (and later died after eating the Daily Mail). Gerald appears to have enjoyed the Beazleys’ company enough to visit them regularly – he surely appreciated the Epicurean and musical elements, and Jack had a lingering nostalgia for the ideals of Grecian youth that had characterised his wilder young days.323 Certainly, Gerald was happy to wear the caps that warmed his bald pate and gave him an unusual aspect indoors. ‘It gives me an air of Ali Baba and startled my landlady the first time she saw me in it,’ he wrote with pleasure. The first one, in light green wool, was sent over when Gerald had ‘a sharp attack of flu’, but others followed in red and various colours and became quite a trademark over subsequent years.
It was through Marie Beazley that Gerald met Gregorio Prieto, a painter, sculptor and poet from Don Quixote’s region of La Mancha in south-central Spain. A friend of Garcia Lorca, the forty-four-year-old artist moved to London just before the war, and was introduced to a series of eminent sitters through the Beazleys. In 1941, he made two portraits of Gerald, both striking and capturing the subject’s enigma in an interesting style that combines realism with fantasy. The first is a painting in which Gerald sits solemnly, almost miserably, before the sea. He is wearing outsize gloves with red stars, holds a big, gold fish and is topped with one of Mrs Beazley’s red tea cosies. The second, more uplifting picture is a pencil drawing of a debonair Gerald in gleaming monocle and bow tie. He clutches a lobster, hinting at the surrealism and jokes he was known for, and pincered in the lobster’s claw and clasped in Gerald’s hand are butterflies, symbols, surely, of his lightness of touch, but also perhaps his vulnerable psychological state. Gerald once described himself as having a ‘lepidopterous’ character even if he was fundamentally an introvert.324 Prieto also drew Clarissa Churchill, cool and girlish, with a book in her hands; Marie Beazley, with blossoms, doves and holding a volume of Dante; and Winston Churchill, staring implacably. Clementine Churchill disliked the portrait of her husband, but bowed to pressure from Clarissa and Gerald and allowed it to appear in a book which came out later, complete with various charming, Cocteau-esque drawings of half-naked youths in shorts.325
Meanwhile, the Mad Boy’s military service was as patchy as might be expected. His older brother Cyril described a visit to his barracks, when the mention of Robert’s name brought a hush to the guards, followed by a summons for the duty-officer. It turned out that Robert was in the guardroom under arrest for stealing a car. ‘But he has one of his own,’ replied Cyril. ‘Is it a large Buick?’ ‘Yes.’
It emerged that Robert had been stopped by the military police and when asked whose car it was, ‘just out of cussedness’, replied, ‘Whose do you think?’ It seemed unlikely that a private would have such a fine model and they locked him up. Later Robert said, ‘You know, it was interesting to see what it was like.’326 According to Cyril, Robert’s section ‘consisted mostly of cockneys’, and given their knowledge of how to work the system and Robert’s car, they all had a grand time; ‘The NCO in charge was kept well in hand.’
In July 1941, after 1 year and 61 days in uniform, Robert left the Army, discharged under Paragraph 390 (XIV) – ‘ceasing to fulfil Army physical requirements. Permanently unfit for any form of military service’. According to Billa, he might have ‘got a wound or something’ (presumably during training) and was in a military hospital set up in St Hugh’s College, Oxford, which specialised in head wounds. It is possible, she added, that ‘it was just a sort of nervous thing’. Others have suggested a chronic problem with migraines; Gerald wrote to Penelope Betjeman that Robert had been ‘granted unlimited leave’ on account of his ‘continuous headaches and the peculiar conformation of his brain’. Could he have taken a tip or two from John Betjeman and mentioned a few neuroses as well, encouraged by Gerald’s psychoanalytic knowledge? In another letter, Gerald wrote, ‘Robert has been removed from the army for being loopy.’ Whatever the case, the Mad Boy was soon back at Faringdon. Gerald too headed over from Oxford when he could, usually staying Saturday to Tuesday. It was almost as if everything were back to normal, although, of course, it wasn’t.
* Later Rayner, then Leigh Fermor.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gosh I Think She’s Swell
HEN ROBERT RETURNED to live at Faringdon in the summer of 1941, the place had changed. The house and estate had been requisitioned by the Army, and about a dozen Nissen huts had been erected in the trees to the side of the lawn. Men from the Royal Engineers and Royal Army Service Corps were stationed there, fixing army vehicles and preparing their food in a special cookhouse. The Folly was now the observation post for the local Home Guard (those on duty saw the glow from the Coventry bombing), and there were pill-boxes and holes in the roads all over the town ready for road blocks. At night, the whole area was darker than anyone had ever known. What with blackout blinds and cars with shrouded headlights, it was easy, walking through the marketplace in the evening, to bump into people. Accidents were legion.
Robert was in his element and set to work organising the estate again and trying to protect it from the soldiers. Gerald reported to Clarissa that ‘Robert made a terrific fuss because a soldier broke a branch off a lilac tree but if one gets away with no further damage than that one may account oneself lucky.’ Coming over for weekends from Oxford, usually by train, Gerald reported that the military were hardly noticeable. ‘Except for distant motor-bikes they are as quiet as mice.’ Robert worked hard on the farm, driving the tractor and joining Fred Shury, his lanky former groom, to plant wheat in the fields by Grove Wood. They managed to harvest and thresh it with help from Italian prisoners-of-war, who were brought in from a nearby camp to work in the fields.
As part of the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, ornamental grounds were to be planted with vegetables – London parks were now sporting carrots and onions rather than flowers, and St James’s Square had rows of cabbages around the central statue of William III. There was an attempt to dig up the lawns at Faringdon, but the foundations of the old Elizabethan house broke the plough and the task was abandoned. Instead, six sheep were put there to graze, and if they were unable to provide the velvety green stripes of the glory days, at least they prevented the grass from getting too high. Vegetables and fruit were plentiful; Mr Morris, the head gardener, was too old to fight and though the urns were no longer filled with geraniums and areas were overgrown with weeds, there was plenty of garden produce. In the summer, plump, scented peaches and purple grapes still emerged from the greenhouses.
Fred Shury was now performing many jobs to cover for the staff who had left. It was he who drove into Oxford most weeks with a trailer of vegetables and surplus fruit. The bulk was donated to the Radcliffe Hospital, thereby gaining an extra petrol allowance for the maroon-coloured Austin 8, but a box of supplies was also dropped off with Miss Alden at 22 St Giles’ for Gerald. Everyone, even the royal family, had been issued with a buff-coloured ration book to ensure that the entire population would be fed fairly, but Faringdon provided myriad opportunities for augmenting the careful measurements and dull, repetitive diet. Soufflé de Berners, with its brandy, eggs, cream and crystallised fruits, was not on the menu, but when friends like Clarissa, Cecil Beaton, Daphne Fielding or Peter Watson were invited for the weekend, there were meals that still met exacting standards. Cooking was done by Mrs Law, and while the food was ‘not sumptuous’, recalled Clarissa, ‘lunch parties for fifteen people were normal’. Still, Gerald lamented the good old days and yearned for the delights of French cooking: ‘For one who is greedy, the striking figure of Brillat-Savarin [author of The Physiology of Taste] is nostalgically present to the palate in these days of rationing and make-shift cookery.’
Mr Morris kept the vegetables coming from the garden and long-standing friendships with local farmers ensured a supply of dairy produce. Perhaps there were more carrots than usua
l – the carrot and Marmite soup sounds a dubious invention – but they were also cooked up with butter and sugar into a mouth-watering caramel. There was certainly no such thing as ‘mock cream’, ‘mock duck’ or other horrors of the wartime kitchen. Robert went off in the early mornings with a gun, returning with soft, bloodied rabbits or a couple of pigeons in his leather bag. In the early summer, he picked morels in the woods and in autumn field mushrooms in the rough grass above the lake. While Gerald was pleased to be back with his birds at Faringdon, he did not object to Robert setting traps for the moorhens and coots on the lake – both provided a dark, rich meat for the table. The exotic birds had been sent off to the zoo because their food was now unavailable, and nobody knows what became of the ornamental ducks that lived in a cage by the fountain on the back lawn. The urge to consume them may well have overcome scruples about their beauty.
Clarissa remained Gerald’s preferred guest at Faringdon after her move to London, but she was not Robert’s. The Oxford rumours that Gerald might even marry her would surely have reached the Mad Boy and Clarissa remembered, ‘He was a bit prickly at the beginning. It must have been irritating. “What was I at?”’327 Robert would have understood Clarissa’s attraction, though she was surely not his type. His prickliness is unlikely to have been sexual jealousy; aged fifty-eight, Gerald gave the impression of being no longer interested in sex, and indeed admitted his relief at this development to A. L. Rowse.328 It was more likely to have been a fear of being replaced as youthful confidant and companion by someone who possibly had more qualifications than him, particularly in intellectual terms. Gerald would discuss his writing with Clarissa, whereas Robert’s role as ‘manager’ had given his position a practical and thus potentially slightly demeaning function. ‘I had a rapport with Gerald,’ admitted Clarissa. But she insisted that Gerald ‘was madly in love with Robert . . . though perhaps there was a masochistic side to Gerald . . . But by that time they were an old couple. They were used to each other.’329
The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Page 22