An Audience with an Elephant (25 page)

Then came the early marriage, and the war. She spent her war in the Dorchester Hotel. ‘Everyone did. It was the only concrete building in London.’ Yet she had little nostalgia. ‘That doesn’t do anyone any good. I think the only thing I really miss is the music. They don’t have big bands any more. But you can do without so much. Before the war you wore a coat with a big silver fox collar and a hat made of feathers just to go out to lunch. I don’t think they should have revived things after the war. They should never have held another Royal Ascot.’

Some of the dresses she wore as a Bright Young Thing were on exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, but it did not bother her that in her lifetime she was history. Her ski suit was there, her wedding dress, her Coming Out dress and the dress she wore as a debutante at her Royal Presentation. They had all, she muttered, been far too big and far too grand. Anyway, they would never have fitted into the penthouse. ‘I was always an awfully good thrower-away.’ She did not know how many dresses she had kept. ‘I can’t possibly tell you. I mean, there are bathing dresses and summer dresses. You can’t count them all.’ But she had had to set a room aside for them. ‘I suppose you’ll want to see that.’ Over her shoulder she said, ‘You’ll find it very neat. I am probably the neatest person you’ll ever meet. I always used to tuck my teddy bears in at night.’

It was at the end of a corridor, past Her Grace’s bedroom, past a cluster of Osbert Lancaster cartoons commemorating the divorce and her travels on Concorde (she is very much for Concorde). ‘Isn’t this a divine common thing to have?’ She indicated the sealed Cellophane bags in which coats and dresses hung like cadavers.

There were drawers of silks and chiffons and furs, racks of shoes, long rows of dresses. The oldest pair of shoes was three years old. ‘I have really learnt to compress,’ said the Duchess, looking round her clothes room.

‘I change once a day. Of course I know what to wear. If you’re going out to the park with Alphonse you wear that. Or this.’ Alphonse was her poodle. It was said in one paper that he went to the park, all of 300 yards away, in a chauffeured limousine, though Her Grace did not own a car. At another time it was said that he wore a jewelled collar, though it had been bought at Selfridges, said Her Grace scornfully. Poor Alphonse, to have ambled on to the firing range. The Duchess kept her press cuttings in a large cupboard in the clothes room; she did not unlock it.

She had one servant, a maid who lived in and a cook who came in every two days. The cook was there that day as Alphonse was being clipped. The Duchess did not cook. She had never cooked. ‘I can’t boil water, and I don’t want to.’ She laughed at this, which was unusual, for the Duchess seemed to be without humour. ‘I loathe kitchens. I hate raw eggs. I hate butchers’ shops. I’m not interested in gardening, either. What bores me is going to dinner with friends who cook. You never see them. What would happen if I lost everything? Oh, I’d manage.’ Inspiration seized her. ‘I’d buy take-away food.’

The Duchess was enthusiastic about Mrs Thatcher, even, oddly enough, about the way Mrs Thatcher spoke. ‘Heath’s voice I couldn’t stand. But Mrs Thatcher’s I like. She’s so normal. She’s got a husband. She’s not kinky, let’s be thankful for that.’ Mrs Thatcher has been praised for many things, but surely not for that before. Her Grace also thought Mrs Thatcher would ‘fix the unions’. She herself dreamt of becoming dictator, in which case her programme would include the execution of terrorists and people who were cruel to children. Her state would thus have something of an Islamic republic about it. ‘It’s such a free and easy age. I read about people who live together for two years and have a child without marrying. I’m shocked it should be so open.’

She was not, she said, a tough person. ‘I can be quite subservient. If they like golf, I’ll walk the golf course with them. I’ve done the lot, racecourses and all. I do have a quick temper, and I never retract. But you can touch me in two minutes and I’m an absolute sucker. I’ve been crying a lot about these wretched Vietnamese. I’m heartbroken about them. My worst thing is that I can become too argumentative. I have strong views about cruelty to animals, to children and about social climbing.’

She thought she had had a raw deal from the press over the divorce, but did not care any more. Invited to sum up her life, she said, ‘A woman who’s had an interesting and varied life; and who has grabbed every opportunity to have a varied life.’ Invited to sum it up in one word, she said, ‘Adventuress.’ She must have seen some surprise. ‘No, no: adventurous. Adventurous.’

The house she lived in for almost 40 years was some 400 yards from her penthouse. The Dorchester, where she spent the war, was 100 yards away. She had to dine at the Dorchester when she gave dinner parties, for the penthouse had no dining room: she said this with the glee of a Girl Guide forced to camp out in Park Lane. Her London was as small as a mediaeval village, and so it must always have been for people of her background. I asked who had lived in the penthouse before her.

‘Arabs,’ said the Duchess.

The Butler of Britain

T WAS AN EXTRAORDINARY
news item. With even Chinese restaurants – a reliable guide to the late 20th-century British economy – beginning to close (two in one year in the town of Brackley), and with public pay rises pegged, there was still one area of uncontrollable growth. Last year the Government managed to increase its drinks bill by 35 per cent, spending £15.6 million on entertaining itself and others. And in a Northamptonshire village an elderly gentleman closed his newspaper and settled dreamily back in his chair.

The MP Tony (‘Its a disgrace’) Banks and the latter-day Anabaptists who write
Sun
editorials, were in complete agreement (‘Eat, drink and be merry! That’s the Government’s new slogan’). But fourteen years into his retirement, home-made wines at 17 per cent alcohol steadily fermenting behind him, the man who for three decades was the Butler of Britain smiled in the knowledge that whatever else had changed, it was still party time in the Gardens of the West.

All my life I had dreamed of meeting such a man. You find them in the footnotes of history, men who are at the centre of things, yet whose perspective on events is so different from that of the great, the latter might be just bit-players in their own history. Fate ruled I was not to meet the Chief Black Eunuch of the Turkish Sultans Harem, or the two Brandons, father and son, who were the seventeenth-century headsmen of Old England. But fate did allow me to meet Bernard Pettifer, now 78, and, in retirement, my neighbour.

For almost 30 years he held the keys to the state wine cupboard. Governments came and governments went; and to him, deep underground beneath Lancaster House, they were all just so many brandies drunk and clarets consumed. He entered these in his ledgers, just as in the harem above the Bosphorus, the Chief Black Eunuch recorded the copulation of the sultans, and the Brandons inspected the vertebrae of the lately great. Men rose and fell, and to him they were of interest only if they insisted on Malvern water or decaffeinated coffee.

You may remember Walter Pater’s lines on the Mona Lisa – ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits: like the vampire she had been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her . . . and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes. . .’. So it was with him.

It is the Banqueting Hall in London’s Whitehall, that huge room through which Charles I stepped to his rendezvous on the scaffold with the younger Brandon, and where now the Government and its guests are awaiting the arrival of the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. All are high on the self-satisfaction of being present at such an occasion and do not notice that the white wine they are drinking will do their teeth enamel no good at all. The Butler and I, we are drinking champagne cocktails.

Everyone else who is there has been invited by the Government, but I am his guest. His authority appears to be older than that of democratic government, and the champagne cocktails have been materialising on the quarter hour. I have already had five and am philosophical, staring up at, and occasionally managing to focus on, the Rubens ceiling. The Butler, ram-rod straight like the sergeant-major he once was, is also philosophical.

‘They come and they go,’ says the Butler. ‘You meet someone who seems to be in charge of the world almost, then he’s gone. I remember the Turkish Prime Minister Menderes. Charming fellow. They hanged him.’ He nods distantly to Edward Heath, who nods back. Assistant secretaries are making small-talk to other assistant secretaries whom they meet every day and do not like much. William Rees-Mogg floats by, impassive as a balloon. But then there is the plop of flash-bulbs, the Chinese have come. Hearing a rhythmic murmur by my side, I turn, and the Butler, his face its usual impassive mask, is quoting
Omar Khayyám
, his favourite poem: ‘Sultan after Sultan with his pomp/Abode his destin’d hour and went his way.’

Together we toast the Sultans. And then he says something I will find difficult to forget, for history of a sort is being made around us – years of diplomacy have led to these handshakes and these toasts (the Chairman is drinking orange juice) – as the Butler says, ‘Of course, you get a much better party when it’s nonpolitical; things are much more relaxed when it’s something like the Olympics.’ He stops, rummaging among his memories for other landmarks in his long career. ‘Or the International Congress of Dermatology.’

It all began in what seems now to have been another world. In 1929 in Northamptonshire a boy was leading a shire horse through the rows of a ploughed field; the boy was young and the horse was very big. It turned, the boy was slow to react, and it trod on his foot. ‘I ran home to tell my mother. I was very tearful, for it had been a heavy horse, and I begged her, could I go into service like my brother?’ Also his three sisters, for that was all there was, the Land and the Big House, and that was all everyone on those flat acres thought there ever would be. The Butler’s tale would be a sombre fable of the old world, were it not for its last strange twist.

Sixty years on, I know that Big House; I know its owner, and might have seen something of life on the other side of the green baize door, except there is now no green baize door. There are no servants either. Yet when Bernard Pettifer started in service there were 20 of them, and it was his job as Hall Boy to serve their meals. In the pyramid of privilege he was at the very bottom.

‘I can remember my master telling a guest at dinner that his father had had 200 servants, and had taken to his bed to sulk when they raised Income Tax by two pence in the pound. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, for to a pauper Income Tax means nothing.’ There was no expression on his face as he told that story. There rarely is, except when he bursts into laughter and looks like a small boy: the years of service saw to that. As a young man he did not once see a soccer match or cricket game, except when teams visited the Big House. He worked seven days a week, from 6.00 a.m. to midnight each day, and was paid £18 a year.

‘What do I think about it now? As with politics and religion, I rarely talk about my old life, but at least I knew where I stood. When you go into the Civil Service, as I eventually was to do, everyone thinks he is in charge of you. In service you have no doubts as to who is. And there was one thing about the men in the Big Houses: they preserved old England – they preserved it as it was. You could say my feelings are complicated.’

It was only when someone left service and returned with tales of a world outside (‘of men’s work’) that he began to question his lot. In 1935 he entered the remote and formal world of the Biggest House of all: he became sixteenth Footman at Buckingham Palace, where there were seventeen footmen. From here, when George V died, he made his first attempt to break away and join the police. He was turned down on the grounds that he had too many false teeth. So his life in service continued. He moved to Marlborough House with the widowed Queen Mary: by now he was married and his wife was a cook there. Then suddenly out of the East came a great wind which blew open the green-baize doors.

He went to war, and at Monte Cassino was promoted to sergeant-major, and was later offered a commission he did not take; he could not have coped with that. At no time during the war did he tell any of his fellow soldiers what he did in civilian life; he was too embarrassed.

The end of the war was the blackest time of his life. His wife and son had been evacuated to Rudand, and on the second day he was home the farmer turned up to say he needed the cottage they were living in for a farm labourer. So Bernard Pettifer turned farm labourer. Not being mechanical, he was given the roughest jobs, and his hands swelled until they were so bad his wife had to tie his boots for him each morning. In despair he went back to service in Marlborough House, and was there when the old Queen died, when he was pensioned off.

And it was then that the extraordinary twist occurred. He saw the job advertised of Catering Manager (One) in the Government’s Hospitality Fund, and applied. To his considerable surprise, he found himself appointed the Government Butler, a job he did not even know existed.