Faul Lines

by David Pryce-Jones

  Senior officers and NCOS were more of the men who had won the war, and out of admiration for them and their esprit de corps I did consider for a while signing on as Harry had hoped. One of the junior officers happened to be Lord Lucan, later believed to have mistaken the nanny of his children for his wife and murdered her, then vanishing without trace. With his heavy moustache and deliberate manner, seemingly he intended to be taken for an aristocrat from another age, accustomed to have his way and keeping to himself. One way or another, there was a great deal of acting up, surely a component of bravery in combat. On NATO exercises, we were dug into a wood. The absurdly exaggerated up-and-down voice of a colonel (who had won a Military Cross in Italy, incidentally) came over the microphone in an exchange with the quartermaster, beginning, “What’s for supper?” Mushroom soup. “How delicious!” For several days discipline was suspended as the men went about repeating and mimicking, “How delicious!”

  Contact with the Germans proved a strain. Shopkeepers, policemen, hausfraus, were overly deferential, as though expecting the worst. There was the occasional drunken brawl. Fraternisation was discouraged. The day the British ceased to be occupiers and became allies by treaty, as at the touch of a switch the German police were on the lookout for traffic infringements, shopkeepers turned their backs, waiters made a point of not serving. The obverse of former deference was open resentment. Encountering people of a certain age, it became impossible not to wonder what they had done in the war.

  While I was away, Alan moved out of Cavendish Close and into a set of chambers in Albany, the supposedly exclusive but slightly austere building in Piccadilly with tablets on walls here and there recording the poets and prime ministers who once had lived in these pseudo-collegiate surroundings. Just as Jessie had organised the departure from Castle Hill, so Doris now decided what to keep and what to be rid of. His chambers, numbered A10, had a large drawing room, a small dining room, a bedroom for him and another up a flight of stairs for Doris. By chance, the adjoining A9 was available, and Alan set me up there, with Briggs the butler upstairs in my spare room – Noël Coward might well have built a play around a father and twenty-year-old son living next to one another like this.

  On leave, I went to Vienna. Meidling by then had been sold for two hundred thousand dollars. All I remember of my first years there is splashing about in a tin tub put out somewhere in the park. To revisit the house was, and still is, to be caught in the pervasive melancholia and sense of loss that is an aftershock of Nazism. I wrote a letter postmarked 18 April 1957 to Max to describe the sadness “because it was easy to see what it must have been like.”

  In Paris on another leave, Cécile de Rothschild invited me to her apartment in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Classical features, an easy manner, a fortune, wonderful possessions, she had everything life has to offer, except that she couldn’t shake off feelings of ambivalence towards her brother Elie and by extension other men in her life. In Cécile’s drawing-room there was Greta Garbo. A uniquely celebrated film star, she too appeared to have, but not to enjoy, everything life has to offer, instead enclosing herself in a veil of mystery. People who had never seen her roles as Anna Karenina or Queen Christina of Sweden were familiar with her keynote abdication, “I want to be alone.” A soldier! Garbo exclaimed when I was introduced. And what do soldiers do? She insisted that I show her how we drilled on the barrack square, so I found myself demonstrating stand-at-ease and about-turn, stamping my feet in front of Cécile’s well-known Goya and early Picasso. My next encounter with Garbo was at Royaumont. Cécile had driven her over from her own house in the nearby village of Noisy. Garbo and I knocked up on the tennis court. The day was so hot that she took off her shirt and played topless, so flat-chested that she looked more masculine than ever.

  Towards the end of my two years of national service, I was transferred to Pirbright, another Brigade of Guards depot. In July 1956, Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. On stand-by to retake the Canal, we blancoed our webbing a desert colour instead of khaki, and painted vehicles yellow. In the final years of the British presence in Egypt, the Coldstream had been stationed there, and some remembered Fayyum and Lake Deversoir. Former national service officers were recalled. One of them, Angus Macintyre, already an Oxford undergraduate, was so annoyed that he came into the officers’ mess in nothing but a buttoned-up greatcoat and boots without laces. I wrote to my grandmother, “Preparations for war are very exciting here. We sail for Cyprus next Thursday week, and then on to Tripoli and the Egypt approaches via Tobruk. Everybody is hankering for a fight but sadly it won’t affect me as I leave the army on 24 August.” Tales of incompetence came later. It was as if the British army had never undertaken operations abroad. Brigade headquarters and front-line soldiers had apparently crossed in opposite directions. On 25 August, the day after demob, I arrived at Royaumont. Also released from national service, Jacob Rothschild was driving me in an Aston Martin lent to him by his father. We were to spend a fortnight with Antoinette de Gunzbourg in a villa she’d rented at Estartit, a village on the Costa Brava. On the way home, the Aston Martin broke down and, incongruously roped on to a bullock cart, had to be hauled off to a garage.

  A day or two after I was installed in Magdalen, Cécile and Garbo were my first visitors. We walked through the Cloisters out on to the lawn in front of the New Building where I had my rooms. As luck would have it, a hundred yards away were Tom Boase, the college President, and with him Peggy Ashcroft, almost as famous an actress at least in this country. They hurried over. Agitated, Garbo ran off much faster and was gone. “Was that Garbo? I’ve always wanted to meet her, you have to fetch her back,” Tom Boase pleaded, to which I could only say, “I’m afraid she doesn’t want to meet you.” Feline and manipulative, he had the manner and fixed smile of the faux bonhomme he was. I didn’t improve things later with a parody of Goethe’s poem, “Boaselein, Boaselein, Boaselein rot, Boaselein auf den Heiden.”

  After the freedom of the army, Oxford was a stultifying return to school. Girls had to be out of your college by a certain time, undergraduates had to be in their college by a certain time. Breaking these rules condemned you to climb in, which in Magdalen’s case involved hauling oneself up a lamp post fitted with discouraging spikes. Since I failed the obligatory means test, my scholarship was taken away but I still had to wear a gown. Now married to Isaiah Berlin, Aline de Gunzbourg lived in a beautiful house in Headington. I knew that for Poppy’s sake she would be in loco parentis and I went to tell her that I had outgrown Oxford and proposed to leave.

  Jessie Wheeler and David in the last summer before the war in the garden at Montreuil, the house Mitzi and Frank built close to Le Touquet.

  Even retired, Jessie still looked as if she were gathering us together from the four corners of the earth.

  Refugees on the sea front at Cannes in 1940. LEFT TO RIGHT: Jessie, six-year-old Elly Propper, Aunty Lily just married by procuration to Elie de Rothschild, David, and Marian Stainer, Elly’s nanny.

  After their London house was destroyed in an air raid, Alan and Poppy and David lived at Castle Hill Farm, a couple of miles from Tonbridge.

  Max and his three sisters celebrated their survival and reunion at Royaumont at the end of the war.

  At Seefeld, then an undeveloped resort in the Tyrol, Poppy made the effort late in January 1953 to ski with David. Three weeks later she was dead.

  Mitzi outside the ancient church of St. Mauritius, Alltmawr, in the Wye Valley for the wedding of Clarissa and David in 1959.

  Mitzi’s 80th birthday with family and staff on the terrace at Royaumont. On her right Max, on her left Bubbles, behind her Eduardo looking sideways. To his left David, then Clarissa.

  Long since sold, the Royal Welsh Warehouse acknowledges its origins.

  Clarissa in front of the Gros Chêne, an oak of immemorial age in the woods of Royaumont.

  Aline and Isaiah persuaded me to hang on. She was a study in elegance, and he looked like one of the preoccupied,
benevolent and humorous figures H. M. Bateman drew in his cartoons. A three-piece suit and a battered felt hat completed the picture, even in summer. His rapid and bubbling way of speaking conveyed genuine interest in the human race and its doings. Whoever had something new, especially gossip, to recount could be sure of a hearing. Under the liveliness was a determination to play the game, and the expectation that you too would do so. Isaiah was central to the only intellectual activity that mattered in the university, namely disputing which elements of Left-wing doctrine were essential to Utopia. Education was a process of indoctrination. Openly to oppose Communists like Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol, and the large numbers of fellow-travelling dons spell-bound by Stalinism, required courage, and the few who wore cavalry twill trousers and a tweed jacket were written off as conservatives to be ridiculed. Isaiah had personal experience of the Soviet Union far more meaningful than a fortnight in the country under the control of Intourist or the group-think of the Left. Heart-to-heart meetings with Akhmatova and Pasternak in their homes gave him unique moral authority. Several times I was to hear him say that Stalin was worse than Hitler. Nonetheless he held the progressive views of equality and liberty that had become standardised in the 1930s and had not evolved since then. Liliane was unkind but not wrong to sum him up as “un vieux Juif gauchiste de Russie” – an old Leftist Russian Jew.

  Thousands were demonstrating in the street against British participation with France and Israel in the Suez campaign but not against the Soviet invasion of Hungary. The juxtaposition of these crises put Isaiah to the test. Commitment to Israel was a defining part of his identity. For fear of being labelled a Conservative, he could not bring himself to adopt a public position in favour of Prime Minister Anthony Eden and the military operation. Instead he wrote privately to Eden’s wife, Clarissa, to offer admiration and sympathy. I had been determined to join volunteers from Balliol taking medical supplies to Budapest. Isaiah discouraged it on the grounds that such a risk offered no useful gain. For reasons that must have been deep in his personality, he wanted influence without the attendant publicity. In the absence of civil courage, that necessary virtue, he perfected a strategy of backing into the limelight. Mitzi congratulated him on his knighthood in July 1957, and what he wrote by way of thanking her catches exactly his ambiguous attitudinizing: “I do not see myself on a noble charger – still, what must be must be; and if the Queen says ‘arise Sir Isaiah’ – not easy to say – I shall try at least to avoid fou rire – to which I am sadly and dangerously liable at critical moments.” (Lady Berlin, said Liliane, sounded like the title of an operetta.)

  Against Isaiah’s advice, I returned to Vienna, to stay with Dr Pokorny. Also in the apartment was a young relation of his who had horrifying stories of the Communism he had just escaped. I hitched a ride on a vehicle delivering medical supplies to Budapest. Fresh bullet-holes pockmarked the streets. Russian soldiers patrolled. Either then or in the course of a later visit I interviewed György Lukács, the Marxist critic whose books were much respected at Oxford. A veteran of Red Terror after the First War, and then an émigré in Moscow, he was one of the many who narrowly escaped execution at the hands of those he had done his best to promote.

  The academy and reality seemed disconnected. I spent my first year escaping. John Betjeman’s wife Penelope took me for rides on the Berkshire downs in her pony trap. I was almost as often in the house of Roy and Billa Harrod as in Headington with the Berlins. Billa had seen me at Meidling when I was a few days old. As though in a reconstruction of the Thirties, Brian Howard was at one party of hers, and at another she went round the room introducing her guest with the words, “This, I regret to say, is Sir Oswald Mosley.” Dominique de Grunne also kept open house. Belgian, he was a Dominican monk researching for a doctorate. Writing to Berenson in February 1953, Hugh Trevor-Roper rather sourly marks him down as “obviously the real, handsome, intellectual, social, aristocratic abbé” and a first-rate cook into the bargain. A family friend, he officiated at the wedding of my cousin Elly and Raymond Bonham Carter at Royaumont in the summer of 1958 in the local church where her parents had married. His film-star good looks and his red and gold vestments stole the show. When he subsequently left holy orders, Elly and Raymond wondered what the status of their marriage was. The following year, my cousin Philip married Renata Goldschmidt in Austria. (How did we survive our upbringing? is a question Philip and Elly periodically discuss with me. Spouses who were foreigners had been the means of escape for Bubbles and Poppy, and it was the same for us.)

  In a postscript to his novel The Rock Pool, Cyril Connolly was appalled to note that the originals from whom his characters were drawn had died, but he, the author with his “cautious reptilian tenacity of life” remained – so it is with me. Alasdair Clayre had a masterful intellect and a laugh so comprehensive that it was a shout. As junior officers we had met in the army one snowy night at Pickering, the Yorkshire training ground for fire and movement with live ammunition. I heard music coming from one of the huts, and there was Alasdair, a Grenadier, playing Schubert on the flute and reading Kant. After a starred first and a fellowship at All Souls, he roared through the profession of architecture, published a novel, some poems and songs and a big book about China. My life’s mission, he once said to me, is to reconcile Christianity and Wittgenstein. Out walking in the Oxford Meadows, he suddenly turned and sang Heine’s words set to music by Schubert, “Ich grolle nicht, und wenn das Herz auch bricht” – I don’t complain even though my heart is breaking. That, he said, was his secret. Too brilliant for his own good, he threw himself under a train at the age of forty-nine.

  An Eton scholar, Francis Hope made sure we all knew he was an agnostic intellectual by reading a book disguised as a prayer book throughout the daily compulsory services in chapel. Also a fellow of All Souls, and a columnist for the New Statesman, he published a volume of poems that could hardly have been slimmer. He introduced me to John Fuller, the poet of a generation as W. H.Auden once was. Had Francis not been killed prematurely in a plane crash, he might have become a successor to Malcolm Muggeridge, that is to say an oracle of the media. Angus Macintyre, the Pirbright rebel in 1956, taught history at Oxford, a natural scholar who also happened to be a wit. Clarissa and I and the children spent holidays in Scotland with him, his wife Joanna and their children. Elected Principal of Hertford College, he died in a car crash on his way to Scotland before he could take up the position.

  At Easter 1958, I walked round Mount Athos with David Winn, a farceur able to turn anything and everything into a joke. Unaccustomed exercise made him long for Michael Astor’s Bentley to come round the corner. At the monastery of Vatopedi we shared a guest room. Entering in the half-light, an elderly monk had to be fought off while he made advances saying, “Do you understand me, boys?” – a sentence that David quoted at monks in other monasteries. In the library there he came across a specialist paper written by Professor L. R. Palmer on some incunabula in the library, which he annotated, “Entirely disagree with Palmer. David Winn, Student, Christ Church.” Next term David came to find me because Professor Palmer had written to ask him what these objections were and was inviting him to All Souls for a learned discussion. The professor took it all in good heart. David had a walkout with my childhood friend Sarah d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, and both were drowned in the Channel when Paddy Pakenham took them out in his boat and it capsized in stormy weather. John Calmann, an heir to the high German-Jewish culture, was murdered by a hitchhiker he picked up in France. Jeremy Wolfenden, an old Etonian in the Guy Burgess mould and the capo of a Magdalen left-wing mafia, had written an essay for his All Souls fellowship that Isaiah Berlin said was unmatched in his experience and could go straight into print. Correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, perhaps a secret service agent or even double agent, Jeremy was found dead in Moscow in mysterious circumstances.

  Peter Levi, poet and classicist, Jesuit of Baghdadi Jewish origins, took me to listen to Allen Ginsburg and Gregory Corso glorifying t
he atom bomb to an audience all of whom far preferred to be red than dead. (Next day, the pair stormed into the town hall where Edith Sitwell was giving a recital of Façade. “Oh you are dear boys,” was her winning response.) In the hall at Heythrop, the college for training Jesuits, he said loudly that it had been a great relief to discover that theology was a real subject after all – other Jesuits within earshot looked as if they had received an electric shock. In the Vatican he was given a chastity stick to push his shirt down into his trousers in the bathroom avoiding the risk of touching untoward parts of his anatomy. In the unlikely role of scoutmaster at Stonyhurst public school, he took a party of boys to France and had them leaning out of the train at stations singing the old favourite, Il est cocu, le chef de gare. His imagination ranged from Serbian epic poetry, schemes against the colonels in power in Greece, travels with Bruce Chatwin, to theories about Shakespeare. When Yaakov and Felice Malkin, lifelong friends of mine from Jerusalem, visited him in Oxford, he told them that Israel was the only place where he could be happy. When Cyril Connolly found out that his wife Deirdre had fallen in love with Peter, he coined the multiple pun, “What does she see in this Peter Rabbi?” Leaving the Jesuits to marry, Peter was happy to be living in the English countryside, too happy to bother about his fatal diabetes. One evening Deirdre telephoned with the news that Peter had died, and next morning the post contained a letter from him.