Basil Street Blues (11 page)

On the death certificate issued three days later, Fraser gave his address as Brocket, Maidenhead. The signing of the Supplemental Deed that summer of 1932 had been his act of negotiation back home. But it cannot have been a happy return. His two sons lived mostly in London, and Brocket was a household of squabbling women – even their dogs quarrelled. Yolande by now hated her mother, and her mother hated Nan who had stayed on after the children grew up despite Adeline’s many high-pitched invitations for her to leave. All Yolande’s filial affections seemed to have been transferred to Nan. Between the three of them there were incessant plots and counter-plots, and much yapping at the ankles.

But Fraser was a man of illusions. It was to these illusions we were responding when retrospectively we pictured him as a brilliant mathematician, barrister, athlete and so on. Though his romantic illusions might be shattered, his financial illusions still glimmered in the city of glass he had attempted to create in the West End of London. His optimism shone blindingly forth. Were there moments of panic and doubt? In any event, there was nothing for it but to go on and hope for the best.

When my father had his signature witnessed by the British Consul in Venice on 18 May 1932, he was endeavouring to sell glass to the Venetians. Over the next couple of years he talked Fraser into forming a new department for glass light fittings: table-lights, wall-lights and hanging lights which were sometimes inverted fruit bowls suspended from the ceiling by ropes, decorated with opalescent shells, and fitted with flared flames of frosted or tinted glass. These had several seasons of popularity and were installed by some famous restaurants including Quaglino’s and Claridge’s. But they were not profitable because of the breakage when drilling the glass to the metalwork. One of his designs appears on the title page of this book.

But Basil was keen to develop this side of the business and made contact with a German glass manufacturer called Stensch which, following the Anglo-German trade agreement of April 1933, appointed Breves Lalique as its British agents. Early in 1934 Basil went over to Berlin to meet the Stensch family, and made friends with their twenty-year-old son Rudi, who had been sent down from Bonn University. Being a Jew, he explained to Basil, he had been ‘retired’ from Bonn as a result of the national boycott on Jewish professions introduced by the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Possibly the non-completion of a university career did not strike my father as so very grave a matter. In any event it was his easy-going habit to offer anyone he liked a job in Breves Lalique. He had come over with one of his cousins from Australia (the one who had begun so promisingly in the IRA) and together ‘these two exuberant, extrovert fellows painted the town of Berlin red’, Rudi remembered. ‘…For us Jews, then being very subdued under the first impact of nazidom, it was a wonderful tonic.’ Their air of innocence, their very ignorance, was appealing. For they lit up the hope that this anti-Semitic phenomenon would soon blow away almost as if it had never been, like an illness that passes, leaving no marks, and is forgotten.

Rudi took my father and his cousin to Leipzig where they were to make a reconnaissance of Germany’s major commercial trade fair. ‘I particularly remember when we all went to the local firemen’s ball,’ Rudi wrote to me, ‘and your father and his cousin insisted on driving our car right into the hall and in the centre of the dance floor. They then snatched the helmets of the worthy firemen, donned them on their heads, appropriated the buxom partners of these firemen and began to dance some weird Scottish jig. The impact of these young blades on the oh so German “Spiessbürger” [petit bourgeois] was quite sensational… Heinrich Himmler, you should have been there to watch it!’ For a moment the world of P.G. Wodehouse rode triumphantly over the Nazis’ campaign against decadence.

After a week Rudi returned to Berlin and a few days later he received a telephone call from Basil who sounded in deep trouble. ‘In a muffled voice he told me that he was at the Eden Hotel in Berlin and would I please send him immediately a wire saying that I had heard from London that your grandfather [Fraser] had been taken very ill and would Basil please return post haste. I would get an explanation later.’

My father gave his explanation next day at a
thé dansant
on the roof of the Eden Hotel. It appeared that he and his cousin had become involved with two young women they met at a Leipzig bar, and all four of them spent the night at a hotel. The cousin promised to take his companion to Paris the next day. This gave my father no option but to add that he would take his lady to Stockholm. But next morning he woke to find his Australian cousin had gone in the night. He was left with a girl on each arm and two hotel bills. He paid off the bills and saw that one of the girls got home in a taxi, while the other girl – who appeared in the daylight to be a dramatically painted woman with a loud Saxon voice (a veritable Saxhorn) – he took by train to Berlin. The fake telegram arrived and ‘the histrionic performance of your father when he explained to the girl that, alas, he could not proceed with her to Sweden and how all his life his greatest pleasures were being spoilt by quirks of fate, was masterful’, Rudi wrote. ‘We both took her to the station and put her on the train to Leipzig.’ Then the two young men went on to another railway station in Berlin’s working-class northern district, where my father was to catch the train to Stockholm. Over a few drinks while waiting for his train, Basil repeated his offer for Rudi to come over and work as a trainee for Breves Lalique in London. ‘At that time I faced the problem of many young German Jews whose careers had been suddenly aborted – what to do with my life,’ Rudi remembered. ‘So I accepted with alacrity. I had been in London once before as a schoolboy and had felt at home. If I had to become a refugee there was only one country I would choose.’

It was in the autumn of 1934 that the great Lalique galleries finally opened at 4 New Bond Street. ‘The ornamental glass associated with the name of M. René Lalique deserves recognition as the first attempt in Europe to explore the full possibilities of glass as a plastic material, and Messrs Breves, its agents in London, are to be congratulated on the general effect of their new galleries,’ wrote
The Times
. ‘A plain shopfront faced with travertine, with the name in white metal above, opens to a deeply recessed window which allows a clear view of the whole interior. As far as possible all the working features such as doors, and the decorations of the new galleries are constructed of Lalique glass, in association with stainless steel.’ René Lalique himself, a shy seventy-three-year-old with a white moustache, arrived from Paris hidden in an enormous overcoat, almost two hours late, missing the ceremonial speeches by the French Ambassador and the Mayor of Westminster. But he was not too late to avoid a reporter from the
Manchester Guardian
who noticed him among the guests (including everyone from Lady Oxford to Princess Bibesco) and described his ‘somewhat brisk military appearance suggestive of Cheltenham rather than the Champs Elysées’.

About this time my mother arrived from Sweden.

Ulla was pleased to be getting away from Stockholm. She had an adventurous spirit and she loved travel. Nor did she mind leaving her mother. It was not that she and Kaja didn’t love each other, but they needed to be independent. Living together, they were like two dancers each treading on the other’s feet. Ulla’s feelings for Kaja were a world away from anything Yolande had ever felt for Adeline, yet both daughters had their difficulties. Adeline liked to stop Yolande from going to parties in London. But when Ulla said she was going out to a party in Stockholm, Kaja would dress up and go along too. And what a power dresser she was! The rustle of her dress before she entered a room and the lingering perfume in the air after she made her exit were potent spells that lodged in many imaginations. She had such a sharp eye too and was still so strikingly smart that her presence grew immensely oppressive to Ulla. The trouble was that Kaja, then in her early forties, seemed so terribly old to her daughter, yet she simply refused to behave like an older person. She was delighted when people took the two of them for sisters. Because she preserved such a strict manner at home, it was only gradually that Ulla realised what was going on. Though her mother kept a single gentleman admirer, the distinguished-looking Birger Sandström, famous for his cravats, who escorted her through the high places of society, she also kept company at other times and in lower places with all sorts of amusing bohemian artists. One of them painted her in a fur coat, earrings and lace bodice (I have the painting in London). It was also rumoured that Picasso – or was it Picabia or even one of the Pissarros – had become infatuated with one of her feet while she was travelling abroad. It was usually Picasso in these stories and part of Kaja’s foot was said to appear in his
Guernica
. Her own collection of pictures, near masterpieces all, hung like trophies on the walls of her apartment, the names of the painters – ‘Fragobard’, ‘Valminc’, a rare ‘Edouard Monet’ – echoing discordantly their famous reverberations (she left me a small ‘Verner’ and what looks like an unusual ‘Whatho’!). The distraught Birger Sandström found himself obliged to fire off many agitated telegrams.

‘What a mother! What a daughter!’ exclaimed one of Ulla’s schoolfriends. Stockholm seemed too small to hold them both. So Ulla was not unhappy to be escaping. She would be particularly pleased to miss that one day a week when her father was allowed access to her. She didn’t mind being taken to the opera by him and felt proud of his musical knowledge (though she was embarrassed when he started humming – and besides, opera was not the sort of music she really liked). But what she hated were the evenings he came to dine with her and Kaja. There was absolutely no conversation at all, simply an icy silence and then dreadful bickering.

Ulla had been to France but never to England before. Her English was not bad and under the pressure of events would quickly get much better. Of course she felt a little apprehensive, but on the whole she was excited. It was the summer of 1934, she was seventeen, and she wanted to have fun.

On board the
Suecia
as it set off from Göteborg, Ulla sat at the Captain’s table – Kaja had arranged that. Everyone dressed for dinner, there was a formal toast, and a dignified atmosphere prevailed – at least it would have done had there not been so much noise from one of the other tables, in particular from one persistent raucous English voice. ‘I was annoyed and kept turning round,’ my mother remembered. On the second evening a man swayed up to her table and with exaggerated correctness requested the Captain’s permission to ask Ulla for a dance. The Captain assenting, she found herself waltzing with the ghastly-voiced Englishman. He explained that he had been smoking too many Gauloises, and then went on jovially talking. ‘He could talk anybody into anything,’ she later wrote. He told her he had recently been in Germany and then gone to Sweden to meet important people in Kosta Glass. He spoke brilliantly of the beauties of Lalique and his own rich future in glass. Before they reached Tilbury, he had talked her into giving him her address and telephone number. And also a promise to see him in London. This man was to be my father.

*

Ulla’s first experience of England was a shock. She was living at Beckenham in Kent with a Mrs Malmburg who received pupils for English language tuition. No. 48 Coper’s Cope Road (a name which struck her as incredible – it came from a handsome eighteenth-century house with quoins and a pediment on giant pilasters at the end of the road) was partly a guesthouse, partly a small school. The regime was deliberately English and included kippers for breakfast at 7.30 a.m. which made my mother sick. She was pleased to get an invitation from the man on the boat, asking her to lunch with him at the Grill Room of the Hyde Park Hotel. But Mrs Malmburg felt anxious – until Basil spoke to her on the telephone. By the end of their conversation, she was convinced that Ulla could hardly be in more distinguished company than this Old Etonian director of Lalique.

So Ulla went up to London. She was worried over this first journey by train and bus to the capital. The Hyde Park Hotel, which flew the Swedish flag whenever King Gustav stayed there, was only two minutes’ walk from the elegant Breves showrooms in Basil Street with their ‘Chinese’ wallpaper and permanent display of Lalique. At the Grill Room, Basil ordered Ulla what she took to be a lemonade but was actually Jimmy the barman’s speciality, a Gin Fizz. After the first shock, she found it delicious and had to be driven home by car. But she had sobered up by the time she reached Beckenham, and Mrs Malmburg, impressed by her description of the Hyde Park Hotel, was happy to let her go on seeing Basil. Ulla was allowed to spend weekends at Maidenhead which, to Mrs Malmburg, sounded a pretty safe and proper place. Here Ulla met the amiable if rather distant Fraser, the baffling Adeline (a small figure with tall hair), Yolande dashing everywhere in her short tennis skirts, and Kenneth encircled by his aristocratic friends. Thatcher, the family chauffeur, had retired and his place was taken by Frederick who would drive Fraser, and sometimes his sons and their friends, up to London on weekdays. Ulla used to wonder what he did there until it was time to drive back again. She was always wondering things like that.

Ulla’s English had improved, though she still found the English Js awkward and would speak of waving a ‘Union Yak at the You-billie’. Basil taught her some slang and several naughty words, and he and his friends started calling her Sue or Suzie instead of Ulla which rather stuck in their throats. She was becoming quite anglicised, and picking up extra English culture from her visits to Brocket – the weird offerings of hot-water bottles, the ritual of early-morning tea, the ceremonious walks with the dogs, and the strange procedures when everyone sat down to dinner.

Brocket was then in the last phase of its glory. The lease had come to an end in 1933 but Fraser, still hoping for good things, renewed it year by year. ‘It was a lovely brick house,’ my mother remembered, ‘covered with green ivy, a drive and two gates.’ It had been designed by a young architect called Clifton Davy who became well-known for his domestic work along the Thames Valley. The upper part of the building was built of solid oak half-timbering with herring-bone brickwork, and the house itself divided from Boyn Hill Avenue by an ornamental brick wall. Above the heavy oak front door two quotations had been cut into the stone: ‘Through This Wide Opening Gate None Come Too Early None Return Too Late’. And, more conventionally: ‘Welcome The Coming Speed The Parting Guest’.