by William Boyd
“No. No question. No, definitely. The Allies should take over all of Germany’s mines and forests. Every last tree.” He was reading about the reparation conference in his newspaper. “It’s the only way. The only justice.”
“But Vincent,” I said reasonably, “what we need is cash. Seizing mines and forests won’t provide any cash.”
He looked trapped, dismayed. “Oh.… Oh yes. Perhaps. I see what you mean.” He turned back to his newspaper.
Most of our discussions ran in this manner. Aggressive assertion, polite rebuttal on my part, wordless collapse. He smoked a pipe with a little perforated lid on the bowl. This attachment made me illogically irritated. I heard the clatter of cutlery on crockery from the kitchen and the indistinct noises of Sonia and her mother talking. I felt a profound inertia penetrate me; the air of the room seemed to brew with apathy. I gazed emptily ahead, a thin rope of smoke from my cigarette swaying and shimmying in front of me.
“This was your mob, wasn’t it?” He read: “Thirteenth (Public School) Service Battalion, South Oxfordshire Light Infantry.…” He folded the paper open and handed it over. It was an advertisement for a reunion parade and dinner a month hence. Former members of the battalion were invited to foregather on Wandsworth Common at 4:30 P.M. for a brief parade and address by a Brigadier General Pughe, followed by dinner in the function rooms of the Cape of Good Hope public house in Wandsworth High Street (price, five shillings and sixpence). Applications were to be sent to R.J.M. Tuck (major, ret.).
I was a little late arriving at the common, and I could see a group of several dozen suited men already lined up in front of a small dais equipped with loudspeakers and draped in Union Jack bunting. I walked across the grass towards them, feeling a little nervous. I had been uncertain what to wear and in the end had dressed soberly, as if going to a funeral: a charcoal-gray three-piece suit and black bowler hat. I even carried a mackintosh. It was a mild September day; the chestnut trees on the common were beginning to turn. As I approached I saw that a lot of the men were carrying rolled umbrellas—surrogate rifles, I thought, and wished I had brought mine.
Someone I did not know crossed my name off a list and took my raincoat (“Can’t march with one of those over your arm!”) and I joined a column of men. I greeted a few people whom I recognized and asked myself why I had bothered to come.
We were marched off a hundred yards or so and stood easy. Then we saw three motorcars bump across the grass towards the dais. Some men got out, one of them in uniform. One man strode over to us. I recognized Major Tuck. He went to the head of the column, called us to attention, shouted, “By the left, quick march!” We marched over to the dais, were halted, saluted and were inspected by the brigadier general. Then we listened to him give a halfhearted speech about how we should not allow the iron bonds of comradeship forged in the bitter tempest of war to wither and decay in the soothing balm of peace. We were assembled, I discovered, to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the founding of the battalion. The parade ended with the surviving member of the pipe band (the others were killed, you will remember, carrying stew to the front-line trenches in 1917) playing “The Bonnets of Bonny Dundee.” We repaired to the function suite of the Cape of Good Hope.
Here the atmosphere was a little more convivial. At high table sat the general, Tuck, Colonel O’Dell and Noel Kite’s father, Findlay, and beside him Noel, with a crude wooden hand. We milled around looking for friends to sit beside. I heard my name called and looked round. It was Leo Druce in a chocolate-brown pinstriped suit. He had four medals on his chest. We greeted each other with restrained but real enthusiasm.
“What’s that lot?” I asked, pointing at his decorations.
“Campaign medals. Why aren’t you wearing yours?”
“I didn’t know I was entitled.”
“You were there, weren’t you? Let’s grab a pew.”
We ate rather well: clear mock-turtle soup, boiled sole with a caper sauce, veal collops, roast ham, Coburg pudding and deviled herring roes. (I thought we had done excellently for our five shillings and sixpence. During the speeches I learned that Findlay Kite was responsible for the purvey.) Druce looked prosperous. His thick toffee-colored hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. His shirt looked to me like silk. He wore, I noticed, a large gold signet ring, which I did not recall having seen before. We ate and talked and filled in the intervening years. I had more to relate than he. Druce’s injury had kept him away from the front for months. Then he had been transferred to the Army Service Corps and had been commissioned a lieutenant in 1918. After the war he had tried various jobs and was thinking of going overseas before a modest legacy allowed him to buy a small business in his hometown, Coventry, hiring out motorcars and buses.
As the evening progressed and we drank more, we became predictably maudlin and sentimental. We sought out Noel Kite, by now very drunk, and with the inevitable nostalgia began to reminisce about the “good old days” at Coxyde-Bains and Nieuport. We drank toasts to “absent friends”: Louise, Maitland Bookbinder, Tim Somerville-Start, Julian Teague—
“But Teague’s here,” Noel Kite said.
“Where?”
Kite waved his wooden hand towards the end of the room. “With the cripples.”
A trestle table with a generous overhang had been set up for men in wheelchairs; We made our way down towards it.
Teague’s eyebrows had never grown back and his blunt burned face had a stretched, sore, permanently surprised look to it. His terraced hair grew thick and curly as ever. His trouser legs were neatly pinned up—folded, I thought, like napkins. He was tackling his Coburg pudding with his one good hand. The damaged flesh on the other seemed to have fused the remaining fingers together into a strange arthritic point, like a carved beak. I heard Kite and Druce exchange sotto voce “Good Gods” when they saw him. I sat down.
“Teague,” I said. “It’s me, Todd.”
He looked at me with his one good eye.
“My God,” he said. “You made it.”
I ushered in Kite and Druce and the reminiscing continued. I told them about Teague’s last day as a complete human being. Teague drank a toast to me: “The man who saved my life.” I got rather drunk. I remember Teague whispering to me, “I never told you, but I got MacKanness. Fixed him. Just before you and I met up.” Then Kite said, “Here we are, all that’s left of the bombers.” He looked at me with, I thought, real hostility. “And only Todd came through without a scratch.”
I walked unsteadily back with Druce over Wandsworth Bridge, the coolish breeze off the Thames and memories of Kite’s remark having sobered me up somewhat. Druce said he would pick up a taxi at Parson’s Green. We had exchanged addresses, sworn to meet again at next year’s reunion and in general run the gamut of bibulous avowals. We stood under the electric light at Parson’s Green and made our farewells. I felt a hard obstruction in my throat when I shook his hand and said good-bye. Of all the companions the war had forced on me, Leo Druce was the one I liked the best. I thought back to my miserable weeks with the bantams and felt sure that if I had been with Druce rather than Teague I would have borne up better.
“I’d like you to meet Sonia,” I said thickly. “Must try and get up to Coventry. Once I’ve made this film.”
“I say, Todd,” Druce frowned. “You couldn’t see your way to lending me a tenner, could you?”
“Of course.” I took out my wallet. For some reason I had more than thirty pounds in it. I handed two fivers over.
“Pleasure,” I said.
“Couldn’t make it twenty, could you?”
I counted out another two. “Pay me back when I come to Coventry,” I said cheerfully.
Druce smoothed his hair with both hands. He looked as if he had a dull but nagging ache somewhere inside him, deep.
“In fact …” he began. “Everything I said tonight—to you and Kite and Teague—was a load of nonsense.” He did not smile. “I’m broke. Stony. Bailiffs have got my cars, my gar
age. I’ve got a couple of tenseater charabancs in a friend’s yard, but I can’t afford the license fee. I came here, tonight, to see if I could tap an ‘old comrade’ or two.”
He told me more about his difficulties. I half-listened. I was moved by his candor. In the state I was in I would have emptied my wallet, no questions asked. I saw the essential decency of Leo Druce then, and I felt truly sorry for him. His appearance, his manner, his personality, seemed to promise so much. But nothing in his life had lived up to his potential. I resolved to do what I could to help him.
That did not turn out to be much of a problem. At my instigation, Superb-Imperial hired Druce’s two charabancs as cast and crew transportation for the filming of Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes. He had to wait a couple of months and had to get the vehicles up to Edinburgh, but Maude paid him half his fee in advance, which saw him over his initial difficulties and kept his creditors at bay.
We started filming in mid-November in and around Edinburgh (Harry Bliss was playing Wee MacGregor and we had to wait for him to finish his role in The Blue Cockade—hence the delay). I warned Maude about the problems of filming in limited daylight, but he needed the film as soon as possible and insisted we press ahead. I had insisted for my part on filming in Edinburgh. Location filming was then the latest fashion, but I was prompted more by my own inclinations to authenticity. In the event, it took approximately twice as long as planned owing to appalling weather, Harry Bliss coming down with pleurisy and the holidays at Christmas and New Year’s. For Leo (we were on first-name terms now) this was a bonus, as his fee virtually doubled. As the frustrating weeks went on, so his old confidence returned. As a cost-cutting exercise I was producer, director and cameraman, but I soon relinquished that first role to Leo. His experience of military logistics in the Service Corps proved highly useful. He managed to procure a small mobile generator that enabled us to deploy arc lamps while on location. He also bought three large sheets of mirrored glass, which we used to bounce light back onto the actors on murky days. Wee MacGregor, I am the first to admit, is by no means an example of good lighting, but the fact that it was lit at all was something of a miracle—whose working was almost entirely due to Leo.
One other aspect of the film is worth recording here. At a key juncture in the story, Wee MacGregor, down on his luck, his last pennies spent in a consoling pub, shambles drunkenly out into the rain and weaves his way home to his dreadful lodging house. He spots on the ground a cardboard ticket—the eponymous sweepstakes ticket—and unthinkingly pockets it. I wanted to shoot this moment from Wee MacGregor’s point of view. Recalling my experiments with a hand-held camera in the field outside Elverdinghe, I decided to try again. I broke apart a large alarm clock and, removing the cranking handle on the camera, rigged up the clockwork spring to the turning ratchet. Wound up and set going, this device gave me about thirty seconds of filming at the regular speed of sixteen frames a second.
In the completed film, we cut from Wee MacGregor bouncing off the alleyway walls to what appears to be his uncertain gaze (nice work with the focus) wandering about the cobbled lane. The camera halts at the ticket, wavers, closes up and a hand comes into frame to lift it off the ground. I claim this as the first commercial use in Great Britain, possibly the world, of an independently powered camera. Later, when small portable dynamos and compressed air bottles were commonplace power sources, I still used my clockwork device for short bursts. I never liked cranking cameras and was an early advocate of the power drive. My only regret is that it was not available to me during the first war. I could have filmed the most sensational footage.
The delay in the film upset Sonia, who was most annoyed when I told her I had to return to Scotland after New Year’s, and our marriage experienced its first truly bitter row. She was heavily pregnant and our child was due in January. I said I would try and get away. In fact I was filming in the Pentland Hills when our son Vincent, named after his maternal grandfather, was born. I remember the cable:
SON BORN JAN 5 10:30 AM STOP MOTHER AND VINCENT DOING WELL STOP VINCENT
At first I thought Vincent Shorrold was making some kind of feeble joke. It was only when I returned home two weeks later that I learned the shocking truth and discovered my son was called Vincent Todd. He had been registered and I was told it was too late now for second thoughts. I was violently opposed to the name and fell out badly with old man Shorrold when he demanded to know what my objections were. I had to give way and have always regretted my weakness. I now had a son whose name I disliked. Every time I said “Vincent,” Vincent Shorrold’s face came unpleasantly to mind. As I have said before, names are important to me. This surrender on my part proved to be a serious error.
Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes turned out to be a sizable commercial success. Even the critics were kind. The Daily Telegraph described it as “a delightful example of Caledonian folk-comedy.” The Herald said, “Harry Bliss has never been so hilarious.” Bioscope commented, “A limp comedy of shameful banality redeemed only by its technical excellence.” Close-up remarked, “If this is the best that the British cinema industry can produce, we should shut up shop and go home.” But Superb-Imperial’s audience loved it. The film made twenty-one thousand pounds at the box office in its first two months of release (the trade show was in April 1923). Maude and Rosita were ecstatic. At Sonia’s prompting I asked Rosita to be Vincent’s godmother and she happily consented.
In fact the success came at an opportune time because Maude was having terrible problems with The Blue Cockade. Thanks to Faithfull’s ineptitude it took over sixteen weeks to film and the costs escalated to twenty-nine thousand pounds, not including Mary Mount’s fee. Faithfull now cut me dead at the studios. Apparently he and Mary Mount hated each other. Originally, she had agreed to stay on and make another film for Superb-Imperial, but she left the instant Blue Cockade was over. The film itself was a box office disaster. Even with Mary Mount as its star, no American renter would touch it.
Maude sold the rights to Wee MacGregor to a film distributor, Ideal Film Renters, for ten thousand pounds to make a quick profit. Ideal, so I learned later, paid him another fifteen thousand to make two more Wee MacGregor five-reelers, and these I was duly contracted to film. For the first time I was regarded as a director proper. Maude and I drew up an interim agreement. I would complete the two films before the end of 1923 for a fee of four thousand pounds. Leo Druce was to be producer on them both.
It was not exactly what I wanted, but I could not ignore this good fortune. And, I suppose, this was a happy enough time, this summer of 1923. Leo had moved down to London and we both shared an office in the alley at Islington. Sonia and the baby were fine, and Sonia soon came up with the script for Wee MacGregor’s Holiday and had a promising idea for the third film—King Wee MacGregor!
But I was somewhat unsettled and preoccupied. The Wee MacGregor films were far from the ambitions that had been born with Aftermath of Battle. I applied myself professionally to them but my mind was barely engaged. It was as if my imagination was away on patrol, scouting the countryside for a task that was equal to it. The garrison it left behind, as it were, kept the fort running, ticking over, but life there was drab and tedious. I felt myself oddly demeaned. I was an artist; I had grand plans, fabulous conceptions. The Wee MacGregors allowed me some license to experiment technically, but I was growing to loathe them, and myself for making them. A measure of my disquiet was the fact that I had a bitter stand-up row, over some matter or other, with the irrepressibly chirpy Harry Bliss—whom I could not separate from the character and consequently detested as much. We almost came to blows. Leo told me to bide my time—soon I would be able to do exactly as I wanted. But all I could see was an endless run of Wee MacGregors. Success can confine as easy as liberate. The appalling and interminable Anna and Fido series were dire warnings.
That summer Hamish passed briefly through London. He had just been awarded a research fellowship at Oxford. We went for a meal in a chophouse on the
Strand. I told him of my worries.
“I can see this rut stretching ahead of me,” I said. “It gets deeper and deeper.”
He looked at me without speaking for a while. I have never forgotten the clear force of his expression.
“Make your own rut,” he said. “It’s the only way.”
He was right and it cheered me up. I resolved that King Wee MacGregor! would be my last compromise. “Make your own rut” would become my motto.
Perhaps I should have seen the signs. Raymond Maude asked if he could pay me my fee in installments. I agreed and to my astonishment he handed me a banker’s draft for only a hundred pounds. In September, halfway through filming in Great Yarmouth, a pier owner said that a check Leo had written had bounced. Leo wrote another for him. We finished the film in five weeks and returned to London to start editing. On October 3, 1923, Maude announced to his assembled staff that Superb-Imperial Film Company was bankrupt.
VILLA LUXE, June 16, 1972
Something is in the air, these days, and it’s not just the scent from the yucca flowers. A small electric charge crackles between Emilia and me. I can’t put my finger on it. Something is different. The quality of the looks she gives me. It’s like that time with Oonagh. Superficially all is as it always was, but beneath the surface new currents are running. Something tacit now exists between us, and while I don’t know what it is, it sets me on edge.
I spend the day fretting vaguely. I try to avoid her. When I hear her motorbike disappearing up the track, I go into her WC. I peer at the shutter. I feel as though a billiard ball were jammed in my throat. My small drilled hole is neatly blocked with a pellet of lavatory paper.