Basil Street Blues (19 page)

Over the following eight months Hazlehurst’s letters from ‘C Camp’ and elsewhere near Liverpool show how greatly people’s lives have changed since the nineteen-thirties. London itself seems far away and long ago. ‘What a long letter!’ he exclaims somewhat in dismay at reading Yolande’s news from Maidenhead. He does his best to take an interest, but really his own news is much more interesting. The simple, active, open-air life of the army is beginning to suit him. ‘I have over 500 men in my company,’ he informs her. His only complaint is the cold. ‘If you ever knit anything other than jumpers, you might try your hand at a pair of gloves,’ he suggests. It is the only opening he allows her, and Yolande immediately responds by sending him ‘a lovely dressing-gown & gloves. They are grand, but how naughty you are to spend so much money.’ Then he returns to his war-talk about Baldwin, Chamberlain, Churchill and that ‘damned clever man Hitler’.

‘I have always impressed on everyone I know that we have been taking the [war] too lightly,’ he writes. ‘…We are now fighting literally for our lives and everyone must do something.’ It is probably this call to duty that persuades Yolande to drive library books to prisoner-of-war camps and then join the telephone exchange in Maidenhead.

For reasons of security, Hazlehurst is not allowed to ‘say of course what we are doing’. But he cannot help revealing some of the ‘eventful things happening’, the hectic hours of work in twelve-hour shifts, and the fact that ‘we are all in tents’. He has had a sense of seriousness forced upon him. It is a difficult grafting process and, in moments of reflection, he feels that he has ‘rarely if ever been so depressed about things’. The happy world of yachts and picnics and long summer holidays that he and Yolande inhabited has vanished. ‘There will be very few parties & fun in London in less than a month,’ he writes on 20 May 1940, ten days before the British forces are to evacuate Dunkirk. All the same he is curiously well, and he repeatedly urges Yolande to ‘keep fit, & happy and above all don’t worry about anything’.

Though he signs off with ‘all my love’, there is no actual expression of love in these letters. Yet it seems unlikely that he is writing so openly to anyone else. Yolande is a real friend, a confidante, a pal. Realising that he is revealing to her more than he should of his military life, which is now all his life, he asks her to burn what he has sent her. But of course she cannot. This correspondence is all she has of him, and she continues sending him long domestic letters from Norhurst.

By the autumn of 1940 Hazlehurst has been posted with the 14th battalion of the King’s Regiment to the Isle of Man (where Ronald Stent had recently been dispatched). He feels cut off from everything. ‘No bombs even,’ he complains. His duties include escorting the Governor’s wife to cocktail parties, raising funds from charity events, and starting an officers’ club. ‘I want to get abroad & do something in this war,’ he writes impatiently, ‘and not sit back in England all the time… Better to see some real action than listen to a lot of bloody huns going overhead dropping their loads… If only I were a bit younger,’ he adds, ‘I should be in the RAF.’ This is the time of the Battle of Britain, the German blitz on London and the intensification of U-boat warfare in the Atlantic. There are rumours that Hitler is planning to invade England. Hazlehurst by then must have been in his late forties. ‘Even now the age limit may cease to function & if the worst comes the old brigade can have a go,’ he tells Yolande. But apart from the news that he is being made Brigade Major, ‘I don’t appear to have anything else to say.’

By the summer of 1941 Yolande has some war news of her own. Kenneth has been captured in North Africa by the Italians and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in northern Italy. From here he escapes, is hidden in the mountains by Italian peasants, but then recaptured and taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Romania. Basil, in the RAF at Wilmslow, seems to be at war with Ulla; and German planes have again been flying over Maidenhead, dropping a few bombs on their home runs and driving Adeline into hysterics. Hazel is the only person to whom Yolande can confide such things, for he is as it were part of the family, part of herself, and so she is not betraying anyone by telling him. ‘You have had a perfectly bloody time,’ he acknowledges. Kenneth, as a prisoner of war, is ‘fairly sure of decent treatment’, because ‘we hold such a lot of their people, & reprisals would be easier for us’. As for Basil and Ulla, they ‘appear to be behaving up to their usual form. I’m afraid I did not expect anything else. If Basil can put up with what seems to be a fairly promiscuous wife, well he is a poor boob. I’m damned if I would. I would have too much pride to accept her second-hand from that fat slob Thurnell.’

*

Thurnell, I now recall, was the name my mother told me never to mention within the hearing of my father. Hazlehurst’s reaction to her affaire with him must have been the conventional one. This was the climate of opinion in which my father made his decision to take me back to Maidenhead and, since she would not go there herself, leave his twenty-six-year-old adulterous wife to fend for herself in wartime England.

What Hazlehurst wrote was intended to comfort Yolande. His own opinion surely supported hers. How well she had behaved, and how badly Ulla was behaving, in this war crisis. But the hypothetical reference to his own wife, so impersonally thrown into the argument, may not have brought Yolande much comfort after all. Who is to say what was in her mind when introducing this scandalous family business into their correspondence. But Hazlehurst is preoccupied with Hitler and no longer feels so intimately involved with Holroyd affairs. ‘It is none of my business,’ he writes, ‘so we will forget it.’ The rest of his letter is full of news which Yolande could hear any day on the radio or read in the papers or, if she ever went to such places, pick up in the pubs. It is the stuff to give the troops (Hitler ‘has got his hands full with Russia… the terrific pounding the RAF are giving the hun cities in the Ruhr must be having its effect’, etc.).

There is one more letter in the series. It is difficult to date, being without an envelope, incomplete (ten from what appear to have been fourteen pages) and scribbled in pencil on the writing paper of the Cheshire Regiment. Hazlehurst has been ill with shingles and ‘crops of boils in the most awkward places’. This is due to his not having ‘relaxed literally for years’ and to ‘never [having] had any leave’. When he does get leave, ‘I propose to go & have a fish or something to give me a complete change.’ Without the ‘Yolande darling’ on the missing first page and the regular ‘All my love’ on the last, the letter reads as if it were written to another man.

Hazlehurst did eventually get one of his wishes. After Mussolini fell from power in the summer of 1943, he was sent out to Italy. Less than three years after declaring war on Britain, Italy then declared war on Germany, and Hazlehurst found himself in a friendly country. He must have written a letter to Yolande, but she did not keep it. ‘She learnt one morning that her fiancé had married an Italian woman of 20 (he was nearly fifty),’ my father indignantly explained.

The consequences of this – Yolande’s endless running with the dogs across the fields, her inability to tolerate us as we sat about gulping down our meals, the barricading of the house against visitors, the fiery outbursts at her mother, the putting away of her records in the garage, her retirement into her bedroom – I could see every day at Norhurst. But I could not interpret it and did not try until I came to write
A Dog’s Life
. ‘Poor Yolande!’ my mother exclaimed in her account. My father’s reaction was one of outrage. ‘She was reduced to unpaid nurse to three old people,’ he wrote to me after reading part of my manuscript in 1968. ‘Not much need to ask you to remember what sort of life she leads now – you see it often enough.’

What had gone wrong? And why had her brothers done so little apparently to help her? Perhaps that is the question of a single child, and brothers cannot be used in this way. Besides, it is impossible to tell from this packet of letters whether Yolande really loved Hazel or whether he was the only man she really knew and somehow not quite the right man. Whatever the reason for this sad end to their affaire, her mistake, whether from excessive loyalty or a failure of nerve, was to have gone on living with her family. She may well have protected her father from his wife, but he could not protect her from the consequences of living with them both. And the consequences were awful.

Scaitcliffe had not changed very much since my father’s time there. The school had grown from forty to fifty-five boys between the two world wars, and one of the classrooms had been enlarged. A squash court and rugby fives court which had been built were ‘in constant use’, the prospectus assured parents. An extra playing field had been bought from a farmer, extending the grounds to some twenty acres. Otherwise the red-brick, late-Victorian pile stood with its chapel in Crown land as before. My father would also have been able to recognise some of the names – Riley-Smith, Cornwall-Jones – of boys whose families, like himself, were continuing to send their sons to Scaitcliffe. So he was doing the customary thing. Yet after reading the account he wrote towards the end of his life of the hell he endured there, I cannot help being surprised. Why did he do it? One answer is that Scaitcliffe was the only preparatory school he knew, and there was little opportunity during those war years of getting to know other schools. But I don’t think that he would have wanted to act differently whatever the circumstances. Though he spoke to me kindly about homesickness, I had no idea he had been miserable himself at Scaitcliffe. Quite the contrary. The only clue lay in a book he gave me, F. Anstey’s
Vice Versa
(which I later saw filmed by Peter Ustinov as
A Lesson to Fathers
). In this story the father, Mr Bultitude, who is much given to praising his time at school as the happiest days of his life, is magically obliged to change places with his son and re-experience the tortures of his boarding school. I enjoyed this novel, but I did not pick up the signal my father was sending me.

He was an optimist, my father. He wanted to believe that things were getting better and all was for the best. He had suffered because of his brother, but I had no big brother overshadowing me. Besides, it was only when he was approaching the fragility of his second childhood that the miseries of these early years came back to him. In his late thirties, during these war years, the ups and downs of school life did not seem such a big business.

Yet my father was eager for me to do well at school. He had never really come to terms with missing so much through illness when a boy. Success had been blazing away somewhere else while he languished in Switzerland. When had he ever been applauded or thumped admiringly on the back? He won no silver cups, wore no coloured badges. He breasted no tapes ahead of others, saved no penalties, never scored a century. Everything he had missed now seemed to return and take hold of his imagination. I was to be his second chance, play another innings for him, take the field as his substitute. I ran, I jumped, batted, bowled and kicked for him – and looking through the school records I find I represented him not badly. At the age of twelve I made the winning long and high jumps (13ft 2in and 4ft 4in); I won the Senior Challenge Cup and a cup for fielding; I became vice-captain of the football and the cricket teams.

By far the oddest of my accomplishments was as opening batsman for the cricket eleven. The family money had dwindled so drastically by then that my father and grandfather could no longer afford to buy all the equipment I needed. So they were delighted when I came in from the garage at Norhurst one day carrying my Uncle Kenneth’s bat and pads. He had put them to good use at Cambridge in the nineteen-twenties, but would not be needing them now, we all agreed, in his Romanian prisoner-of-war camp. So I could have them. We would write and tell him they were in use again, and he would be pleased. Many years later I wrote an essay called ‘Not Cricket’ in praise of this bat and pads.

The pads were deeply yellow and reached almost to my shoulders. I peeped out from them unafraid. The bat was a mature instrument, well-bound and fully-seasoned, giving out a deep note when struck, like a groan. I admired that bat – but I could not lift it. I was ten or twelve; the bat was more than a quarter-of-a-century old… I would drag it to the crease and then, as it were, leave it there. As I took guard there occurred a total eclipse of the stumps. The bowler had not even a bail to aim at… We stood there, my uncle’s bat and I, keeping our end up, while runs flowed and wickets fell at the other end. I had a good eye and would watch the balls swinging my way with great keenness, making lightning decisions as to what shots I could play. But I never played them except in my imagination.

The Scaitcliffe School Notes record that, like my grandfather at Uppingham, ‘Holroyd was the soundest and most correct [batsman], but a slow scorer.’ That was a polite understatement. Occasionally, over the seasons, a ball would glance off the edge of my uncle’s bat and flutter through the slips bringing me a run. But it had to go almost to the boundary to gain me time to reach the other end in those pads. What the score sheets do not reveal is that, despite my meagre totals, and though going in first, I was often out last doing something desperate with the bat, handling it as if it were a Scottish caber. I was the nightwatchman who watched the day, and my perfect total was nought not out. If I was not popular with the other side, I was scarcely a hero with my own. My batting partners were obliged to score most of their runs in boundaries, and those lower in the batting order seldom got much of an innings. Once, when stranded between wickets with my vast anchor of a bat, I was run out, I could not tell which team uttered the loudest cheer.

Nought not out summed up my achievements at this age. There seemed to hang about me an undefined air of promise that prevented me from doing anything at all. I seldom spoke first and never took an initiative. To attract attention, it seemed to me, was to ask for trouble. I strove for invisibility. What I liked most, because I had never experienced it before, was ‘joining in’ whatever was going on. I liked the Sunday walks in our blue suits through beechnuts, conkers and sweet chestnuts (which we were allowed to take back and toast for tea) to the ‘Copper Horse’, the equestrian statue of George III that looked towards Windsor Castle down an avenue of trees three miles in length called ‘the Long Walk’. Sometimes we walked to the Duke of Cumberland’s Obelisk at Smith’s Lawn, heads bent, on the alert for pieces of shrapnel. I loved also the epic games of ‘Convoy’ in the wilder reaches of Windsor Great Park, hiding in the heather or behind trees, then veering off between ‘destroyers’, or ‘submarines’, ‘minesweepers’ and ‘battleships’ as we risked finding out who was what and then tried to remember as we raced for headquarters. On our way back, walking in crocodile past the flaking white façade of Fort Belvedere, we would glance around for items of the Crown Jewels which Edward VIII had thrown over the wall and into the park, we believed, when told he had to abdicate. I remember too the excitement of climbing into one of the massive hearse-like Daimlers that took our teams to play matches against other schools: Sunningdale and St Pirens; Heatherdown and Earlywood, each with their tribal rallying from the edge of the playing fields. I even enjoyed lining up with all the others for Nurse Minima to spoon us our ‘Virol’ or ‘Radio Malt’ each morning; also lifting up my voice in the chapel and losing part of myself in the collective singing: Decani versus Cantoris.