It was spring, and we sat out on the terrace at the back of San Martino. At midday, the butler, Giovanni, overweight but always jolly, wheeled drinks out on a trolley. Frank took exception to the jug of tomato juice, saying that “everyone knows” tomato juice is served in bottles. “Are you telling me how to run my house?” Mitzi bridled, whereupon the two of them started shouting. Alan led the way to a bench at the bottom of the garden, where we could hear the noise but not make out the words. Within hours Frank had left for London. In their old stamping ground of the Connaught Hotel, he fell ill. Although only 63, Frank had bronchitis and was dying. The doctor, an old friend of theirs, sent for Mitzi. Now she reproached herself in her diary for having made things worse. For example, “If only I could stop thinking of when I was unkind to him.” After his death, she was to have a breakdown and a spell of three weeks under the care of nuns in a casa di cura in Florence.
In his lifetime Frank had paid lip-service to religion, but was no church-goer. Worship and theology were not for him, and penitence even less. In the manner of a novelist putting real experience into imaginative form, Mitzi had created a fictional version of herself as someone giving but never receiving love, and now she created a fictional version of Frank. On occasion, often in resorts like Venice or Salzburg, he had given her trinkets, it might be a ring or a brooch, it might be a stone, a medallion, a flower or a leaf, even a letter or photograph. Sixteen in number, these were what she called “Proofs” of divine blessing. She had two handsome and sizable boxes made of dark green leather with an inscription in gilt lettering, “Supernatural Realities As Experienced By Frank And Mary Wooster.” Ungrammatical and strictly meaningless phrases of the sort became sacralized. The materialistic, happy-go-lucky Frank was compared to his near namesake Saint Francis of Assisi.
Montesoni is a hilltop a few miles south from San Martino, up an unmade track that leads to a church. Since the war, Harlé the chauffeur had driven Mitzi and Frank between France and Italy in an Armstrong Siddeley. To preserve the car’s sacred association with Frank, she had it buried and immured under the church. A hundred yards away stands a shrine that she had erected to commemorate him. At its centre is a structure in brick, the shape of an altar. She had set into it a safe in white marble about eighteen inches high. On the door of the safe, another example of the linguistics inspired by Frank was incised in large black lettering, “He made souls shine out.” Her diaries often record what she took to be illumination, for instance, “To my horror and misery as I returned to my seat I felt a stream of light inside me and it took me above my angel.”
A great deal of her time was spent on a high mission that she called, “Unite The Impossible.” According to this oxymoron, religions had a common divinity, and once this was acknowledged diversity of belief and worship would be fulfilled in ecumenical harmony. As a promotion, she had the three words printed on Christmas cards and brochures. She pointed to the weather, to vapour trails of aircraft, the flight of birds and many a small coincidence as evidence that Frank was influencing the details of her life as well as the course of world events. Things might appear to be going badly, but that was because human beings were unable to see higher purposes at work. The phrase she invented to register evidently predetermined advances or retreats was “Pushed And Blocked.” Every morning, she would mark up articles in the newspapers to be clipped and filed in order to demonstrate that politics and history itself were moving in the approved direction.
At one level she remained her former self, up to date with exchange rates, say, the virtues and vices of statesmen and the publication of new books in at least four languages. She let you know that she was reading Teilhard de Chardin, Simone Weil and Thomas Merton, and corresponding with Roger Schultz, the well-respected Prior of the Protestant seminary of Taizé. Her nose twitched at any conversation bordering on her preoccupations, however, and she would say, almost sing, Ha, H’m, implying that she had insights that you were too blinkered to appreciate. Your eyes will be opened one day, the knowing look on her face indicated. Not knowing where to put this or how to respond, you kept silent and behind her back passed it all off as her signature tune. The grandchildren had a joke that she was broadcasting on Radio Toscane, a very private station.
The emaciated figure of Don Fosco Martinelli, the parish priest, was often in San Martino. He wrote and published little devotional stories for children. While Mitzi was in the casa di cura she sent him a blank cheque. Astute enough to post it back to Max with a covering letter, he could be sure that his bona fides was assured and specific requests were granted. Mitzi paid for a campo, a playground for the parish children, and she took on the expenses of a young Florentine woman paralysed from polio and hitherto supported by the church. In England, she paid for restoration work on the west wing of Peterborough Cathedral because Frank had been confirmed there. She paid for the Wooster room at Canterbury Cathedral.
The clergy homed in. To my knowledge, she was on terms of friendship with Cardinals König, Willebrands and Dalla Costa. I can put a name but not a face to a whole crew open to the accusation of taking advantage of an elderly lady forging a fictional identity to free herself from guilt and Judaism. Pater Hildebrand, the priest of a modernist church built in the park at Meidling, Dean Riddell, the Reverend Howard Root, a Vatican insider by the name of Father Pierre Deprey (who “borrowed” her books about Proust) were among others in constant touch, careful to hit the exact note of admiration and humility. For years, Father John Livingstone of the Anglican Church in Paris was pre-occupied with her diaries. Writing to his superiors long after her death, he could speak of the fanciful nature of her wishes yet thought the diaries would interest researchers into religious or sexual psychology. Inexplicably he recommended that the family ought not to be allowed to lay hands on them. In a letter in September 1972, Father T. M. Hesburgh of Notre Dame University, Indiana, wrote in his capacity as head of the Ecumenical Institute at Tantur near Jerusalem to thank her for what he called the immensely interesting portfolios and documents she had presented. “Generations of scholars,” he assured her, “would find this gift a source of new insight into spiritual matters.”
A competition opened up over the future of her house between Monsignor Agresti, Bishop of Lucca, on behalf of the Catholics and Harold Isherwood, Bishop of Gibraltar, on behalf of the Protestants. A letter of 25 March 1976 with the signature of John Fulham and Gibraltar laments the legal and financial difficulties the church would face if Mrs Wooster made a gift to it of San Martino. All clerics were ready to turn the property into a religious institute on her terms, but she was offended when they asked for higher endowments than she was prepared to pay. Robert Stopford, Bishop of London, and his wife invited themselves regularly for holidays at San Martino, and in return they entertained her at Fulham Palace. How much of her diaries, if any, the Bishop had actually read is not clear, but he flattered her that they were of the greatest importance as the testimony of a genuine mystic in modern times. He arranged for photocopies to be lodged in the library of Lambeth Palace. Hints that the family might contest her gift of the house skilfully drove a wedge between her and her rightful heirs. This particular Bishop appeared to be the one who finally had got his hands on San Martino.
“I see him married to Elizabeth Cavendish before long,” Mitzi wrote about Alan in her diary just before her big and final scene on the terrace with Frank. Alan had evidently confided in her, but not to me. The stay in Florence, I thought, had been an obligation, the subsequent visit to Ireland a junket. First stop was Birr, belonging to Lord and Lady Rosse. Tony Armstrong-Jones, her son by a previous marriage, was there. Moving on, we lost the way and stopped to ask where our next host, the Duke of St Albans, lived. “His Grace is round the bend,” was the answer. Across the threshold of this mad Duke, I spotted just in time a trip wire at ankle height. In fact, Alan had the serious purpose of getting me together with prospective in-laws. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire had a house party at Lismore, their rambling castl
e. There was nobody my age. The Duke’s sister, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, was ten years older than me. After dinner the Duchess made everyone play a game that involved writing a line of poetry and passing the paper on to the neighbour who composed a rhyming line and then the first line of the next couplet, and so on round the room until everyone had a complete doggerel. The aristocratic in-jokes were above my head. That was awkward enough, but the day we left Lismore, Alan told me that he would like to marry Elizabeth. I understood that I had been brought to Ireland so that she and I could have a look at one another. I couldn’t help seeing this as a betrayal of Poppy, in her grave only a matter of weeks, and said so. Alan never mentioned it again, but unwittingly I had closed off what might have been a much happier outcome to his life. She devoted herself to John Betjeman and on the occasions when I met them I regretted my uprush of emotion on that Irish visit.
A week at Bayreuth with Alan after I had left Eton really was a junket. In the pension was an upright piano, and in the morning he would sit at it and take me through the leitmotivs of the Ring cycle. Jane Panza, an American lady with a large car and a chauffeur organised afternoon sightseeing. She already had in tow Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld, his newest publisher. On good terms, the two were not yet entangled in the rivalry over Barbara Skelton that made them the talk of literary London and put them at odds. The dining room in the magnificent Schönborn castle at Pommers-felden had rows of silver double eggcups, and Cyril did a sudden extended turn about the cooking and eating of eggs, three at any one time being too many. We trooped into Haus Wahnfried, more a shrine to Wagner and his descendants than a home. Alan played the Welsh card with Frau Winifred Wagner who came originally from the next-door valley to Dolerw. Marrying Siegfried, Wagner’s son, she had worked the composer’s mystique into an essential component of Nazism. On her desk were signed portraits of Hitler and Goebbels. What would your reaction be if Hitler were now to enter the room? Alan asked. I should be thrilled, she answered. In the midst of her raptures about these former patrons and her regret that they could no longer help, I caught George Weidenfeld’s eye and we have been the best of friends ever since.
After my eighteenth birthday, Mitzi began pressing Alan to make over to me shares that she had given Poppy but which for fiscal reasons had been held in his name. At the moment of signing the relevant papers in Lloyds Bank, Alan asked if I knew that I would be well-off with an income of thirty pounds a month. He had a friend, Richard Howden, whom he thought I ought to meet. Once or twice, not more, I dined with Mr Howden in his club in Pall Mall. A pot-belly pushed out the waistcoat of his three-piece suit. I thought him a crotchety old buffer and rather a bore. Another secret: he was a psychiatrist and Alan had commissioned him to write a report about me. Whether by accident or design, Alan left lying about a longish letter from him where I was bound to find it and pick it up to read. According to Mr Howden, the ideal for a young man was the old Roman one of mens sana in corpore sano, and it was a sorry state of affairs that I did not correspond to it. In this view I didn’t love Alan, and the reason was very simple: he wasn’t rich enough. I would always turn to Granny Wooster, Mr Howden concluded, because my one true love was for her money.
EIGHTEEN
Second to None
IN THE YEARS of the Cold War, it was possible to enlist in the navy for national service and learn Russian in Cambridge on behalf of naval intelligence. I sat for a scholarship to Magdalen College in Oxford, which if I passed was credential enough for the naval course. Several dons sat in on my oral examination. One of them, a small man with a slightly nasal waspish accent, opened proceedings by asking, “Why are you wearing a tie?” I thought it the right thing to do, I replied. Upon which he said, “What a boring boy you must be.” He was himself wearing a bow tie, so my comeback should have been, “For the same reason as you.” At the porter’s lodge in Magdalen, a note was waiting. John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls, somehow had found out where I was and he had invited me to lunch in his college. Another guest was Somerset Maugham. Back at Eton, at about the same time that I heard I had won the scholarship, out of the blue a letter arrived to inform me that the military college at Sandhurst was about to call me up. Keeping the secret to himself, Grandpa Harry had put me down at birth for a regular commission in the Coldstream Guards and was no longer here to help me back-pedal. At an appointment with General George Burns, the officer responsible for the regiment, I had to agree to drop the navy and serve two years with the Coldstream on the understanding that afterwards I’d give up Oxford and sign on for longer.
On a beautiful September day, I reported to Caterham, the Brigade of Guards training depot. The barrier at the entrance opened to what might have been a foreign country. Everything was done at the double amid a lot of shouting. Those who aspired to become commissioned officers had been enrolled in the so-called Brigade Squad, perhaps half of whom in this intake were Eton friends. An hour or so of haircutting, the issuing of kit, the foul-mouth talk of an old sweat of a Grenadier sergeant about sexual activity, began the transformation into soldiers of public schoolboys like me, hitherto sheltered from experience of the world at large. The day’s routine of inspection, marching and drilling, the process known as spit-and-polish for bringing kit up to standard, instilled instinctive obedience to orders and a sense that whatever has to be done must be done as well as possible. Perfectionism connects to artistry. The national servicemen in the Brigade Squad as a rule endured this shaping more easily and with better humour than the much tougher regular guardsmen in other squads.
Alan had written the libretto for Nelson, Lennox Berkeley’s opera that was to have its opening night at Covent Garden a few days after my arrival at Caterham. Ian Erskine, a sleek Grenadier captain, was in charge of the Brigade Squad, and it was foolhardy to ask him for a twenty-fours hours leave. Opera? Covent Garden? He grimaced as if he’d bitten into something vile and the duty sergeant hurried me out of the office. I couldn’t persuade the others in the hut to listen to the BBC broadcast of the performance.
Army boots were blistering my feet, the blisters were turning septic, but it was perhaps even more foolhardy to report sick. Malingering, pronounced the Caterham doctor without bothering to have a look. By the time the thirteen weeks of basic training were over and we had leave, I was hobbling. The moment I was home, Alan announced that he had arranged to have me invited with him that same night to a ball given by Chips Channon at Kelvedon, his country house. Chips, properly Henry Channon M. P. shared his life with Peter Coats, improperly known as Petticoats. Chips’s son Paul was my exact Eton contemporary and had often asked me to a meal in the Channon house in Belgrave Square, a decorator’s extravaganza worthy of Chips’s hero, mad King Ludwig of Bavaria. My feet were not up for dancing. Now it was my turn to be left alone at home in the company of Doris waiting for the doctor while Alan drove out into the night in a white tie.
Officer cadets went on a course at Eaton Hall, the immense Victorian house built by Alfred Waterhouse for the Duke of Westminster. Duly commissioned, I spent my first few days as a second lieutenant in Chelsea Barracks. Grandpa Harry had marched out of these barracks in August 1914 for France, and just half a century later I set out from the same barracks for Germany. The Coldstream Second Battalion was stationed in Krefeld in the Rhineland. Rubble from wartime bombing was still piled throughout the British zone. In nearby Düsseldorf, the Park Hotel was intact, but its street, the central Königsallee, had shop fronts with nothing behind them. The damage in Cologne was even more extensive.
The battalion occupied an impressive barracks built in Hitler’s day. A great deal of planning and a great deal of expenditure had gone into it. The buildings were in solid brick. Framed in the middle of the main block was a huge panel, also in brick, of Nazi insignia. Bullets had been able only to chip away at this indestructible relic. The officers’ mess was in the main block and their rooms were up above it. The first level below was a garage. The second level below had gun mountings and holes in the w
all that could only have made it an execution chamber.
Rehearsals for the annual ceremony of Trooping the Colour were in progress. The occasion is a display of turnout and drill at the highest standard possible, and so an assertion of regimental pride. There was also an element of competition with the Scots Guards and Grenadiers in Fourth Guards Brigade. On the morning of the event, about 1,500 guardsmen mustered early and anxiously. General Sir Charles Loyd, a distinguished old soldier, was to take the parade. I had hardly had time to get to know the men in my platoon. Standing still while waiting for the ceremony to begin we were inconspicuous somewhere far down the parade ground. Suddenly I heard my name called out over the loudspeaker. Drill-sergeants are the impresarios of such an occasion, and the next thing I knew was that I had to fall in with one of them on either side. We marched at the drill-sergeants’ pace right across the parade ground in full view of the entire Brigade. The only question was what could I have done to be disgraced so publicly? I was brought to a halt in front of General Loyd. My heart pumping, I took in his bright blue eyes and white moustache. I’m so glad you’re here with us, he said as he leant forward confidentially, your grandfather Harry was one of my best friends, we were at Modder River together, he was such a fine soldier, he’d be so proud to know you are here today.
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