Surviving

by Henry Green

  A MEMOIR

  BY SEBASTIAN YORKE

  ‘The trouble with cats is that they don’t live long enough. This in a way may be fortunate, because they have pretty well taken over the whole of London.’

  HENRY GREEN, 1964

  Born on 29 October 1905, Henry Vincent Yorke, the youngest son of a squire with a large house and an estate in Gloucestershire, was writing hard by the age of eleven or twelve under the pen name Henry Michaels.

  The house – Forthampton Court – and its estate lie on the western bank of the River Severn about two miles from Tewkesbury and in plain view of its Norman Abbey. The house was used by the Abbots as their imposing country residence from as early as the twelfth century until 1549 when the last Abbot, John Wakeham, also Bishop of Gloucester, died there. After passing through various hands, the house and estate were sold in about 1750 to John Maddox, Bishop of Worcester. In 1762 his only daughter, Mary, married Hon. the Rev. James Yorke, fifth and youngest son of the first Earl of Hardwicke, Lord High Chancellor to George II. With the succession of their son Joseph Yorke, the long connection with the Church finally ended and the Yorke family – direct descendants of Joseph Yorke – still live at the Court and have been landowners there for seven generations.

  Henry’s father, Vincent Wodehouse Yorke, was the heir from the fifth generation and issue of his father’s second marriage, whose first wife and grown-up son, Augustus, had both died prematurely – the latter in bizarre circumstances. His ambition had been to be an actor, and on the night of his stage debut, after a celebration, he set fire to his nightshirt with a candle, while relieving himself in a chamber pot, and burnt to death. Henry’s parents habitually set great store by family precedents. This was the only example, before their teenage son Henry had started to write fiction, of a Yorke being attracted to the arts, and they did not hesitate when the opportunity presented itself, to attribute Augustus’s immolation to over-indulgence in drink.

  Like his own father, John Reginald Yorke, who was consulted, on a regular basis, by Lord Randolph Churchill about classical quotations for his speeches, Vincent was a classicist by inclination; it was said that he could read Homer in the original as a young child and for the rest of his life this was to remain his staple bed-time reading. Subsequently a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, he had worked as an archaeologist in Greece and Asia Minor. Vincent’s mother, Sophie Mathilde, was a daughter of Baron Vincent de Tuyll de Serooskerken, a Dutch nobleman, whose family owned Clingendael in The Hague. Named after the Baron, who had married an Anglo–American, Vincent Yorke had a donnish manner and little small talk; there was also a bullying side to his nature. He married Maud Evelyn Wyndham, a daughter of the second Baron Leconfield, in 1899.

  Of the two, Maud was the more remarkable character. Brought up at Petworth House, virtually uneducated, amongst dogs and horses, she had a natural wit and could hold her own in any company. She was born with a curvature of the spine and prescribed a glass of port a day to build her up; she had to spend many hours as a young child lying flat on a wooden board. An uncle was Lord Rosebery, Prime Minister between 1894–5; his horses had won the Derby three times and that may have inspired her interest in the turf. A blunt-spokenness belied her rather slight and bent frame. Maurice Bowra once asked her about one of her horses which had failed to come up to expectations. She replied, ‘We had to put him under the grass!’

  Henry’s origins were a matter of indifference to him. He was rarely to speak of them. After the Second World War, he never visited Forthampton again because he said it was below sea level and ‘an unhealthy place’, and he complained that relations bored him and made him feel guilty.

  Maud and Vincent had three sons: Philip, Gerald and Henry. Philip, a brilliant King’s scholar at Eton, died of lymphatic leukaemia when he was sixteen. Gerald, the second son, was a talented academic like his father and a batsman in the Eton cricket XI. Henry had no scholarly or athletic talents, but he played as one of the second violins in the School Orchestra.

  When Vincent, who was a young don and not rich, married, his family purchased the assets of a semi-bankrupt engineering business – The Farringdon Works and H. Pontifex & Sons Ltd – to give him a start in commerce. In due course, this was to provide him with an entrée into the City, where over the years he secured a number of lucrative directorships in banking and insurance. He retained a link with his interests in classical Greece by serving as Honorary Treasurer of the British School at Athens for exactly fifty years.

  Life at Forthampton was dominated by field sports: Vincent was Master of the Ledbury Hunt and Maud bred racehorses from a stallion called White Knight. She also hunted furiously, and Henry was to complain in later life that her practice of riding to hounds well into the sixth month of her pregnancies must have badly undermined his health. Henry found refuge in fly-fishing and billiards.

  A bleak glimpse of family life at Forthampton is provided by a fragment of dialogue found among Henry’s paper, written probably when he was nineteen.

  After dinner, Vincent reads the paper:

  Vincent, reading In 1920 there were 4000 less dogs born in England than in 1924.

  Silence

  Vincent I won’t speak again.

  Maud Henry, did I ring for coffee?

  Vincent You did dear, I’m sorry.

  Maud Ring again Henry will you? No dear boy, not that bell, it doesn’t ring. I’m afraid something must have gone wrong with it.

  Henry rings

  Silence

  Maud Billy, did you write to Hepworth about the kitchen range?

  Vincent Yes dear, I sent the letter off directly you told me. I do my best.

  Maud The cook is in despair, Vincent. I do not know what to do about it, and this brute of a man Hepworth will not send anyone to mend the range. He can be up to no good in Birmingham, Vincent. What does he do all day? Playing about with the typists instead of doing the work?

  Vincent, reading In Somerset, two boys were drowned in a river.

  Maud Oh Vincent, you do irritate me so. Now do think about the kitchen range.

  Vincent I’m sorry dear, I thought you liked hearing the news. Yes dear, I’m listening.

  Maud, clasping face Well, then what shall we do about the kitchen range? It may break down at any moment. Vincent, are you listening?

  Vincent, scratching dog Yes dear.

  Maud Then do leave the dog alone.

  Vincent, tapping his teeth with his nails Very well dear.

  Maud Do you think it would be best to write again? The cook is desperate you see, Vincent.

  Vincent I have written. I can do no more.

  Maud And did you tell him all that was wrong with it?

  Vincent What do you think? You do bore me so with your questions. Now let me read the paper.

  Silence

  Vincent I wish my sons ever did any work. Here’s a boy who died of overwork last Saturday.

  Henry Misguided.

  Maud Died of what did you say?

  Vincent Of overwork, my dear. I am afraid our sons are in no danger of that.

  Maud What a curious thing! I didn’t know that boys could die of overwork.

  Sees Gerald get up to change chairs.

  Maud Gerald, as you’re up, could you go and see what has happened to the coffee? What can be the matter?

  Vincent Into the sink

  It fell

  I think

  With a clatter

  Silence

  Vincent, plaintively Nobody laughs at the jokes old Father makes.

  Henry Gerald slams the door as he goes out. No.

  Vincent I’m afraid the boy is liverish.

  Maud Yes, both of them are.

  Henry was educated at boarding schools between the ages of nine and eighteen. He and Gerald were close enough in age to be at Eton together for two years. They ‘messed together’ and were extremely supportive of one another, taking sides against Maud and Vincent in frictions with their parents. The other senior
boys in his ‘house’ were jealous of the privileged relationship between the prefect and his very much younger brother. When Gerald left, Henry complained that he was savagely flogged by Alec Douglas-Home, later Lord Home. At Eton, several of Henry’s short stories were published in the school magazine, College Days. His parents were suspicious about his writing and early stories were shown to John Buchan who strongly advised him to give it all up as a bad job.

  Henry went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1924 to read English and went down after two years without a degree but with a half blue for billiards. He found it difficult to concentrate on Anglo-Saxon and did not get on with his tutor, C. S. Lewis. He formed a close friendship there with a young don at Exeter College called Nevill Coghill, who read his manuscripts and volunteered advice, most of which he seemed to ignore. Later in London he met Edward Garnett, a reader for Jonathan Cape, who helped him with his first two novels.

  The first, Blindness, started while he was at Eton, was published by Dent in January 1926, under the pseudonym of Henry Green. Next he started, but could not finish another novel, called Mood. Between 1927 and 1928, living in workmen’s lodgings and working an eight-and-a-half-hour day, he served his apprenticeship on the shop floor of the family firm in their Birmingham factory. They were, and still are, heavy engineers. ‘It’s a harder, but in many ways a finer life than I thought it would be,’ he wrote in a letter to Coghill. ‘Some of the men are magnificent. The words they use even more so.’ There he started and finished Living, his second novel. It concerned factory workers, and was published in 1929 by Dent. Upon leaving Birmingham, he married a country neighbour and distant cousin. She was Adelaide Mary Biddulph, eldest daughter of the second Baron Biddulph, and always known as Dig.

  The couple set up home in Radnor Place and he started work in the London offices of Pontifex which Vincent had by now built up into a thriving concern. Henry’s older brother, Gerald, had studied at Cambridge and been awarded a First in Part 1 and Part 2 of the History Tripos. Subsequently, having failed the examination for a fellowship at Trinity, he also joined the family business but detested book-keeping and found he could not work with his father at all.

  Their views of Vincent were contrasting. Henry was much in awe of him; many years later in all seriousness he announced to a friend who worked at Pontifex: ‘My father is the cleverest man in the world!’ Nevertheless, the sons found him impossible to communicate with. A favourite tactic of Vincent’s was to refer to himself, in the third person, as ‘the poor old man’. If taken to task by Maud, who addressed him as Wodehouse on those occasions, he would declaim in a high-pitched whine: ‘The poor old man is only doing his best – no man can do more!’ Although Vincent had managed the affairs of the British School of Athens with great skill and generosity, he was aloof and tight-fisted to his family and his staff. The factory workers – accurate judges of such matters – laughed behind their hands at his habit of alighting from the bus a stop before Acocks Green and so saving a halfpenny on his fare. Because Henry’s books did not sell well, his father never took Henry’s writing seriously, and this was always a source of deep resentment.

  In the event, Gerald only stayed a few months in the firm before deciding to concentrate full time on his hobby – the study of the Occult – although he remained firmly committed all his life to maintaining Forthampton Court and its sporting traditions, shooting rather than hunting being his passion. In 1937, he settled down and married Angela Vivien Duncan, daughter of Major-General Sir John Duncan. They had three sons.

  Much later Henry used to say in cruel tilt at Gerald’s hobby that he had put his three young sons down on the waiting list for Eton rather too late – but a fortunate series of deaths and suicides which wiped the slate clean allowed the Yorke boys to sail through.

  Between their marriage in 1929 and the war, Henry and Dig lived a social life as Bright Young Things. Through Dig, they became friendly with the playboy Aly Khan and moved in his circle, travelling abroad with him. It may be that his third novel Party Going is based on a holiday with Aly Khan which went wrong in the fog. Another friend of that period was the working-class writer and merchant seaman James Hanley. Henry lent him money on at least one occasion and pleaded his case for wider recognition with Edward Garnett and Lady Ottoline Morrell. He wrote to the former in 1931 while fixing up a dinner when they could meet, ‘I have a genius here, a man called James Hanley. He was until a short time ago a docker and has since written books, which have been published in limited editions, about working men and has got everyone else cold. . . .’ Garnett was not impressed, although he did grudgingly praise Hanley’s short story ‘The Last Voyage’. Two years later, still persevering, Henry wrote to Lady Ottoline Morrell in similar vein ‘. . . but I can’t help feeling [Hanley] has a great command over words and that is the gift or the enchantment without which a book is nothing and, in that it shows a high attitude of mind, is perhaps what all the rest will follow on. His working-class speech is, to my mind, unsurpassed by anyone writing now.’ Lady Ottoline did offer some practical help to Hanley, making him the loan of a room and a typewriter. It was the first and not the last time that Henry was to help a neglected or aspiring author.

  These two friendships were typical of his style: he did not generally seek out friends with backgrounds or origins similar to his own and his friendships were short-lived. Nor were his friendships close – he always kept his distance. By the war he had dropped almost all his old Eton and Oxford friends and he rarely saw Gerald and Angela any more.

  Henry was a mad soccer and sports fan. In Birmingham after the compulsory Saturday morning shift, he had faithfully watched the Villa every week. In London he transferred his loyalties to Chelsea, and until well into the fifties he would be a regular spectator on the terraces at Stamford Bridge or Craven Cottage when Chelsea were away. During the thirties he became friendly with the boxer Jack Hood, who trained for his fights with a one-legged publican called Wally Weston in the billiards room at Madresfield Court, the seat of the Earl of Beauchamp. He was also an early fan of all-in wrestling, attending bouts, sometimes twice weekly, at The Ring, Blackfriars, where ‘Spider’ Harvey presided as referee.

  In 1934 the couple moved to a larger house in Rutland Gate with servants, and I, their only child, was born. Despite the move and a busy social life, he wrote Party Going (started in 1931 and published in 1939) and Pack My Bag (published in 1940).

  In October 1938, fearful of the war which was imminent and of being separated from his family and job, he joined the Auxiliary Fire Service as a part-time fireman and it was probably about then that his fascination with pub life started to develop. It was not only that he liked to drink, which he often did to excess – but he loved to eavesdrop on and to chat and mingle with the pub regulars. Later, in the fifties, he could spend up to four hours a day in two different pubs: at lunchtimes he visited the pub near his office, and in the evenings the George IV near where he lived in Trevor Place. Sometimes, having visited the pub before dinner for an hour or so, he would return to the pub after dinner and remain there until closing time. To the regulars he was simply Henry who always sat at the same table wearing his raincoat and hat with a glass of gin and water beside him.

  His conventional social life was structured around the two evenings a week the cook had off. Dig and he would go out for dinner every Tuesday and Sunday to the same restaurants, alternately with the same friends or couple. Drinks and talk flowed on these occasions and it was no coincidence that the wives were usually pretty and vivacious, for he loved to flirt and gossip. He abhorred literary gatherings and although his friends outside the pubs were generally other writers, painters or intellectuals, he did not discuss writing or books by choice. If a book came up in conversation with his friends, it was dismissed as ‘good!’, or ‘pitiably bad!’ How he had arrived at that judgement was not generally a matter he would go into even if pressed. His verdicts on books were always instantaneous and you felt that they were right.


  This disinclination to discuss books was somewhat surprising because reading, for which he had a voracious appetite, was his chief recreation and relaxation. He read all the current English and American fiction as it became available from the Harrods Lending Library, most of which by his lights must have been pretty dismal stuff. The only writers he refused to read were Simenon and C. P. Snow. On average, he must have got through about eight books a week and sometimes my mother changed their two library books daily, to the despair of wide-eyed Miss Clutton who manned the exchange desk at the library. The standard of the novels never seemed to matter. I can only remember a few times when he put a book down with the words ‘This is utterly bogus – I can’t finish it!’ He rarely praised a book; there were some American authors he would admit to liking, but he seemed to admire no contemporary English writers. He never re-read a book or selected one from his small library of ‘classics’ collected in his Oxford days. Nor can I recall him reading anything by his professed idols: Gogol, Turgenev, Doughty, Céline or Faulkner. He only liked novels – he would not read poetry or biography. He loved thrillers and magazines, particularly Time magazine. When as a teenager, I was interested in motor racing, he used to read aloud a weekly article called ‘Pit Stop’, written by a mad car buff and full of quasi-technical jargon, which he had found in one of my motoring magazines. He would shake his head over this and howl with laughter.

  As with the books he professed to admire, he never went back to the passions of his childhood – billiards and fly-fishing. He completely abandoned billiards when he left university, refusing even to play bar billiards in the pub, and he never fished much any more, even with me, because he steadfastly refused to visit Forthampton where I spent my school holidays. In any case, it was impossible by then to fish for chub with the fly because the Severn was so muddy from the barge traffic.