An Audience with an Elephant (9 page)

I met him when I was seventeen. He suggested we had tea in a hotel on the seafront at Aberystwyth, but in summer there are many clerical collars in Aberystwyth. A fat man in specs passed, and I hoped it would not be him, then a cheerful chap with a pipe, and I hoped it would not be him either. But then a third man came, a tall, lean athletic man bent against the wind — and it was the face of the poems. When I wrote about it later, I used adjectives like ‘hard’ and ‘severe’, and had the phrase ‘almost predatory’. By return of post came a letter from Thomas, in which he signed himself ‘Nimrod’. That sense of humour, faint and dry, and so baffling to the young, was the strangest of all his contradictions.

Moments

Who Wrote This Stuff?

HE ASSISTANT PRIVATE SECRETARY
’
S
embarrassment was evident, even on the telephone. Oliver Everett, a civil servant transferred to the Prince of Wales’s Office (and a ‘high-flier’ according to a Press which has yet to identify a low-flier in the Civil Service), had always been careful of speech to the point where you fancied you saw semicolons form in air. But this time he sounded as though English were a foreign language in which he was taking an oral exam.

‘It’s about the. . . er, speeches. D’you think. . . umm. . . it might be. . . possible. . . for you. . . to stop using the first person singular? I’ve been asked to pass this on. In future, could you. . . umm. . . remember to use
HRH
?’

‘You mean, I have to remind myself I am not the Prince of Wales,’ I said helpfully.

‘You could put it like that, yes.’

Pronouns were always a bit of a problem. Until the late 20th century, royalty moved in a narrow social group, the members of which had been schooled in the old ways of deference. Royalty was ‘ma’am’ and ‘sir’, and I can remember Lady Jane Wellesley telling me that she had never called the Prince of Wales anything but ‘sir’, which struck me then, and still does, as one of the saddest little confessions I have ever heard. It did not matter that royalty, ambitious to involve itself in social issues, found itself increasingly among people who had never called anyone ‘sir’ in their lives. Royalty was secretly a stickler for the old forms. The first greeting of the day, I had been informed, was to be ‘your Royal Highness’, thereafter ‘sir’. It was hard to keep this up in conversations.

‘Who was this Aleister Crowley?’

‘Wickedest Man in the World. . . sir.’

What complicated things even more was that royalty when it signed letters (which always came by Registered Post) did so with a single Christian name, which suggested an intimacy that never was. It is only on marriage certificates that royalty has a surname, and even then it is a matter of debate as to what this is.

Sighing, I pulled towards me the draft of a speech to be delivered to the Highland Society. ‘It is a matter of some poignance that I should address a society formed because one member of the family raised the clans and another blew them to bits in 30 minutes flat. . .’. I began to change the pronouns.

It had all started late one summer’s night when the phone rang. The caller was a man I had not spoken to for thirteen years, ever since he was the editor of the
Sheffield Star
and I a graduate trainee. Since then, Tom Watson had become a director of United Newspapers, at the time a chain of provincial papers which also included the
Observer
and
Punch.
I was then a freelance journalist in London, and, as we talked, I kept wondering how he had managed to get hold of my home number.

Tom was affability itself, chatting on about people we both knew, before saying, could I give Lord Barnetson a ring? Barnetson was a mysterious figure, a press lord about whom nobody knew much except that he was chairman of United Newspapers, of Reuters and of just about everything else. What was I to ring him about? Tom was suddenly vague, suggesting that perhaps a letter might be better. But what was I to say in this letter? Oh nothing much, just that my old editor had suggested I write. He then chuckled and rang off.

I was 35 years old, unmarried, and a few minutes earlier had been sitting in a chair wondering whether to go out for a drink or to bed. I found myself thinking about the novels of John Buchan, which often started as quietly as that, and the next moment you were in full flight across a moor. As a freelance I thought I should welcome the moor, or anything else which would rescue me from the blank paper and the loneliness. A few days later I wrote to Barnetson. His secretary rang back, first to arrange an interview, then a second time to ask for a curriculum vitae, which I grumpily sent.

It rained the day of the interview and I was soaked by the time I got to the United Newspapers offices behind Fleet Street, where a doorman was waiting for me. He showed me to a lift, which went up all of one floor to where a secretary was also waiting. Philip Marlowe would have wisecracked his way through this; I followed her, clutching my cycle clips the way a child holds a comforter. She showed me into a boardroom dominated by a large oil painting of Barnetson, a man with a small moustache and hooded eyes, smoking a pipe. A door opened and a smaller version of the painting came in, who smoked his pipe and looked at me; he seemed at ease in silence.

And he made all this inconsequential chat, talking, bizarrely enough, about John Buchan (whose election agent he had once been), so that I began to think, what with him and Watson, there were either a lot of men who had time on their hands or were lonely. But then he laid his pipe down. He had some questions to ask, he said. Was I interested in politics? No, I said. Had I ever written for
Private Eye
? No, I lied. And that was it.

He began to talk about something he referred to as ‘this position, which was, he said, to write speeches for a public figure. No, not for him; he was a mere go-between, but whoever took ‘this position would find himself a shoulder for an unnamed man to lean on. He could not say more, but this would involve meeting prominent men, a consummation, he implied, devoutly to be wished. There might be a book in it, he said, showing me to the door, suddenly the young hack again with his way to make.

But what could the man be? Not a politician, not a captain of industry, for these were thick as thieves with journalists. It had to be someone who, despite being famous, was isolated and, from Barnetson’s remarks, vulnerable. There came a point when I began to suspect where these trails converged and I remembered the very young face I had seen eight years before, beyond a scrum of journalists at Aberystwyth, but that seemed absurd. Why me?

A week went by, two weeks. I rang Barnetson. He laughed and said I would have to get used to the pace at which this group of people operated. Yes, it was Charles, he said, and the next thing would be lunch with his Private Secretary, David (now Sir David) Checketts.

In the 1970s, you must remember, royalty was the most secret and mysterious force in society. Biographers kept their distance then, and opponents such as the MP Willie Hamilton regarded it as a regressive but horribly efficient piece of machinery at the centre of things. Yet nobody really knew how royalty operated: it was like an unexplored galaxy, and here I was among its outer rings, my journey just beginning. What would I find at the end? Would I be Buckingham to the Prince’s Charles I?

Barnetson arranged a lunch at the Savoy Grill. Checketts was late. Barnetson sat wreathed in pipe smoke and nodding to famous men. ‘Hello, Harry,’ he said, and then to me, ‘That was Chapman Pincher.’ Then Checketts came. ‘Big boy, aren’t you,’ he said as I stood to shake hands. I remembered him from Aberystwyth during that bizarre term when the Prince was given a crash course there in the Welsh language. Checketts had seemed then like one of nature’s gym masters, forceful, tough, not over troubled by humour.

Over lunch he and Barnetson talked about their country houses while I ate everything on the table, feeling like the Dormouse at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. But when the coffee came Checketts turned abruptly to me and began to talk about what he called ‘a possible role’. No mention of shoulders now. If things worked out I would be a machine, just as he was a machine, for when he outlived his uses even he would be gone. There were no pension rights in his job, volunteered Checketts. He would like to say a few words about what the Prince actually did. A few months before, he said solemnly, he had lent his name to a campaign to have bicycle theft stamped out in Cornwall, and was also passionately interested in having old canals re-dug. Barnetson’s vision of great events was crashing about my ears as Checketts got to his feet. The next step, he said briskly, was to meet the Boss, ‘to see whether the chemistry worked’.

That was August. A month went by. I dropped a note to Checketts saying the chemistry practical seemed to be taking an awfully long time to arrange. The letter from Checketts contained no jokes; the earliest possible time was in October, he wrote, and somehow contrived to give the impression that it was I who was seeking the interview.

I cycled to the Palace on an autumn morning. There were still a few tourists at the gates. They looked at me curiously as the policeman on duty scanned a list of names and pointed me towards the Privy Purse door, the right wing of the façade. I was finally inside. A sentry’s boots crashed into the gravel as he turned a few yards from where I crouched, chaining up my bike, for old habits died hard and bicycle theft figured large in my mind.

A man in a tailcoat was expecting me and I sat under Frith’s Derby Day (there are no prints in the Palace) as he phoned through. There was no sign of a living soul as I was directed across the inner courtyard to the Prince’s offices. I was nearing the centre of the galaxy. Which, incredibly, was a line of luggage as far as the eye could see, enough to equip a battalion for embarkation, except that each case, each hat box, bore the three feathers. That was the first shock, for the Jubilee was just over and I had read many articles on the Monarchy as a force in the modern world, yet here was the sort of kit an eighteenth-century aristocrat would take on a Grand Tour.

That was all. This time there was nobody waiting for me. In the end I knocked at a door and the young man who appeared seemed pleased at the interruption, any interruption. He was an army officer, the Prince’s military equerry, and took me to Checketts, who occupied a large office opposite. This looked like an Oxford don’s sitting room except that there was a large black Labrador asleep on the floor. Checketts rang through and we walked to an old lift which took us to the second floor. He raised one finger, knocked on a door and disappeared as suddenly as the White Rabbit.

I was left among the red and gold, red carpets, gold framed oil paintings almost touching, and a decor which could have been by the man responsible for Gaumont cinema foyers. The sheer amount of stuff on display was remarkable; come the revolution, someone could go out of his mind trying to produce an inventory of Buckingham Palace. My journey was ending. Like Pompey, I was about to enter the Holy of Holies.

The door opened and I went in. More oil paintings, more reds, more gold, a leather-topped desk and the Prince of Wales coming round from behind it. He was wearing a double-breasted blazer with bright brass buttons. He looked startlingly like his photographs, only smaller. A high colour and good features, which nevertheless looked as though they had been assembled in a hurry, from memory. What I remember most is the hand I shook which was completely at odds with the rest of him; it was massive and strong, and my own hand disappeared into it.

It was a very peculiar job interview. My prospective employer seemed ill at ease, licked his lips a lot, played with a signet ring, and kept giving those eerie social smiles where the eyes wrinkle a fraction of a second before the mouth moves. It was I who asked the questions. Did he see it as a full-time job? No, part-time. Was he looking for a researcher or, I searched for the word, a phrase-maker? A researcher, said the Prince: he would write his own final drafts. But the curious thing was that Checketts introduced me to other members of the staff as the new phrase-maker. Phrase-maker. Rain-maker.

But little of this registered at the time for the Prince kept saying the strangest things. He said he was not an ambitious man. All people seemed to want, he said gloomily, was to see him; as far as speeches went, it was of no matter what the content was. There was a marked melancholy in everything he said. He found it hard to remember faces, and people became so annoyed at this for they forgot how many faces he saw. Asked whether he was looking forward to America, he said no, not really; that he made it a practice not to look forward to anything, so that anything, if it happened, could surprise him. And then he said the strangest thing of all.