Basil Street Blues (20 page)

My moments of happiness often came from these conspiracies of self-forgetfulness. I also made at Scaitcliffe my first two friendships. One was with a boy called John Mein with whom I often paired off during our Sunday walks. One Sunday afternoon he came back with me to Norhurst and I showed him the walking-stick gun with which I had almost shot my grandmother. As a precaution, it had been hidden on the top of a tall dresser in the dining-room, but unfortunately my grandfather had not unloaded it, and we unintentionally shot a cartridge past the parrot and into the ceiling. No one found out, and after the shock we had to hurry into the garden and burst into laughter. What we laughed about at other times I no longer know, but we were always laughing and the joy of that laughter I remember vividly. Sometimes we laughed ourselves into sheer helplessness. ‘
I’ll give you such a smite, Holroyd!
’ one of the masters cried out in despair after John Mein and I had spread our staggering laughter through the complete cast of the school play, a historical drama with us attired as General Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm at Quebec. It was a passion, this laughter, that released me from innumerable apprehensions. At another time when I went to stay at his mother’s house in Sussex, we almost drowned ourselves in a boat so uncontrollable was our condition. John Mein remembers taking me ferreting that week and ‘you didn’t like me wringing the rabbits’ necks – but you always were a tender soul!’ I have no memory of this, though I recognise my squeamishness. For me John Mein was a poet of the ludicrous and an imaginative storyteller, who lost his shyness in comedy and stories, and taught me how to do the same.

Another wonderful storyteller was my friend Christopher Capron. He would fill Wellington dormitory after lights-out with glowing tales of adventure and mystery. I could never have enough of these stories. ‘What happened next?’ I would demand, and he would give another spin to the plot. One by one the other boys, Bowman (the clever one who was bullied), Drummond (who played the piano), Molins (who was always being beaten), Palumbo (who was our sports star) and Stirling (who had a secret society with a language no one understood) fell asleep. But I was always awake at the end, clamouring for more.

I knew John Mein and Christopher Capron only four years of my life, but I count them both as lifelong friends, one the Muse of Comedy, the other a Keeper of Stories, because their liberating influences have lasted all my life.

Scaitcliffe was probably no worse than other preparatory schools of the time, and in one respect it was certainly better. In the grounds, between the playing fields, lay an excellent kitchen garden from which, for much of the year, we had fresh fruit and vegetables to add to our war diet of dried eggs and baked beans, our porridge and chocolate tart. Other schools loved coming to play us at cricket and football because they could wolf down such scrumptious teas. This was largely due to Mildred Vickers, a believer in milk and, fortunately, in cream. She studied our diet sheets, and prescribed Haliborange to supplement our rations.

Ronald Vickers, the formidable headmaster of my father’s time, had died eighteen months before I arrived. In the attic at the top of a pitch-pine staircase lay the first Mrs Vickers. Or so we believed. Mr Vickers was now up there too, of course, encased in lead, awaiting arrival of his second beloved wife. After lights-out we dared one another to climb the stairs to this attic and look through the keyhole. Chetwynd minor said that when he did so the handle of the door had turned and a voice whispered ‘Come in!’

Ronald Vickers’s twin sons, whom my father had seen when a boy being wheeled across the lawn in their double-pram, were abroad fighting in the war, and the acting headmaster was Denis Owen.

Denis Owen was a remarkable man. As a teenager, he had won an exhibition to Oxford but was unable to go there because his family had no money. In 1927 he had been recruited by Ronald Vickers to take the place of Edgar Ransome, that twenty-stone ‘coarse old man’ my father had so hated. All the distinction of the school during my time there derived from Denis Owen. His career was spent teaching the sons of well-off families who did go on to university. He was a small, wiry, tough character with a hooked nose, dark hair, a grim expression and demonic energy. He coached us brilliantly at cricket and football; he ran a debating society, played the organ in chapel and gave the sermons, took shooting lessons, taught Latin, French and English, worked himself and us, indoors and outdoors, round the clock. Though boys from other schools envied us our delicious teas, they were glad not to have our strict and strenuous regime. We were woken at seven o’clock by the clashing of a bell handled by one of the gardeners, and after washing at the bowls of decanted water in the dormitories and hurriedly pulling on our grey shirts and shorts, our ties and sweaters, we proceeded in line to our first service in the chapel where the biblical figure of Denis Owen was already at work on the organ. Then, following a ten-minute scripture lesson, we went in to breakfast. The rest of the day was crowded with Latin gender rhymes, fielding practice, multiplication tables, gym, English grammar and spelling, cross-country runs, the recital of dates in history, and appalling plunges into the open-air swimming pool (an uninviting arrangement of concrete and corrugated iron in which we nakedly splashed, watched by the keen eye of Mr Bailey who also took us for drill). Most of the teaching was unmemorable, but Miss Stanton’s hesitant French lessons, and the spitting and shaking of Mr Perry’s mathematics reinforced by something known as ‘the Perry Punch’ (a clenched fist, one finger angled, delivered to a painful spot on the upper arm) stay in my mind as being peculiarly terrible. Mr Perry was an irritable old man, stinking of tobacco, whose large yellowing moustache concealed a bullet hole from the First World War which was, in our opinion, his one distinction. Worst of all were the piano lessons in a tiny room called ‘the sardine tin’. When I struck a wrong note I was immediately stopped, my finger taken and placed on the correct note, and then forced up and down on it, again and again, jarring the sound through my body. I gave up piano lessons, saving my father three guineas a term, but have regretted it for the rest of my life. Perhaps the war was responsible for such bad teaching. Perhaps it was the same everywhere.

But Denis Owen commanded our respect if not our affection. I think we all recognised that he was somehow special, though we also thought he was extremely frightening. ‘He certainly petrified me,’ John Mein remembered. The beat of his footsteps through the corridors of the school, especially at night, started a wave of pounding fear ahead of him, and we would hold our breath until the sound receded. Maybe I feared him more than most, for I was ridiculously sensitive. I can still blush when I remember the eruption of laughter in class when I pronounced surgery as sugary, called a Quaker a Quacker, came out even more disastrously with an ‘earthquack’, and gave the Thames two phonetic syllables. Mr Owen appeared unaware of my sensitivity, however, until awareness was forced on him by a sensational episode.

One morning when the bell clanged outside and we all got out of our beds, I noticed across the lower sheet a large cherry-coloured stain. Nurse Minima noticed it too and I was closely questioned. I answered that I did not know what it was and felt quite as baffled as she did. That evening I was summoned to Denis Owen’s study and after waiting nervously in the passage, that same passage in which my father had sometimes waited thirty years earlier, was severely questioned again about the red area on my sheet. At first I had thought it must be blood, but I had no wound or nose-bleed. It was inexplicable. My ignorance must have been transparent, and perhaps Denis Owen suspected that I had been the victim of a practical joke by the other boys in the dormitory. In any event I was not beaten that night. Instead I was told that, whatever the stain had been, it must never reappear. I thoroughly agreed and returned upstairs. But a week or two later it did reappear, bright cherry-red across the sheet – and this time I knew what it was. In the early hours of the morning I had half-woken, found that I had wet my bed and, still half-asleep, put my red dressing-gown underneath me before going back to sleep.

Nurse Minima sent me back that evening to the headmaster’s study and Denis Owen, who was busy, told me that I must come to him next day with a convincing explanation. This was more difficult than it sounded, not only because I felt the explanation to be unspeakably humiliating, but also because Denis Owen was so awfully unapproachable. Between the formal lessons, the organ-playing and sermons, he appeared to inhabit Olympus. I saw him once that day striding across a distant field with that grim expression on his face, and I ran some way after him but did not get near. The thought of interrupting his progress with my dreadful story was simply impossible.

That evening I was again summoned down to wait in the passage outside his study. Then he called me in, told me it was too late now for explanations, bent me over a chair in my pyjamas and began beating me. However, I was by this time in an extreme state of nerves and, at the first stroke, releasing all my pent-up emotion, let out a vast cry. It was as much a shout as a cry, mingling protest and pain in a great emotional eruption. The sound, I was later told, travelled upstairs and into rooms throughout the school. No one knew what it was, but everything came to a stop. Nothing so loud and unexpected had happened since the famous night when a public house nearby called The Bells of Ousley had been blown up by German bombers. Even Denis Owen appeared shaken. He told me to go back up to the dormitory, and at the end of term wrote a devastating report to my father, questioning him as to whether I was really fit for the rough-and-tumble of a boarding school. It was, I now think, an opportunity for my father to tell me about his own ‘absolute hell’ at Scaitcliffe, but I do not recall that he did so. He was worried by the practical difficulties of having to remove me, as he had been removed for different reasons. So I went back all the more determined to develop my skills of avoiding attention.

My last year at Scaitcliffe was the best. I did not actually like going there after the holidays, but then I did not like going back to Norhurst at the end of term. I did not know what I liked or where I was going: whether to Maidenhead with my aunt and grandparents; or to various places in France with my father; or to London with my mother, and then across the North Sea to meet my other grandmother in Stockholm and roomfuls of my incomprehensible Swedish cousins in Borås and Göteborg.

I needed everything to be simple. But by the end of the war my parents’ lives were growing more complicated, and these complexities began infiltrating my own life.

My mother wrote that she was ‘without a penny’ at her boarding house in Cresswell Gardens, and that there were ‘days when I only had a glass of milk’. She lived largely on what Kaja was able to send her from Stockholm via the Swedish Consulate. Occasionally she would come down by train to Scaitcliffe, and sometimes also to Maidenhead ‘where you were left for me to see for a few hours. We always had tearful partings – you wanted to come back with me. I was desperate & believe that you were too.’

Everything began to change after my father left the Royal Air Force. In the first week of April 1946 he attended a medical board which found that he was still suffering from rheumatoid polyarthritis. His disability was rated at forty per cent and, ‘with regret’, he was declared unfit for further service. He had been billeted in Paris for eighteen months ‘chez Madame Dimier’ in the rue Sergent Hoff, a small street near the Arc de Triomphe, and after his discharge he continued living there. It was a solid, spacious apartment block built in 1912 and decorated on its balconies by sandstone flambeaux containing quivers and arrows, also pineapples and lions and swags of dependant fruit and flowers. Above the large portal with its art nouveau decorations was fixed the head of Silenus framed with grapes and vine-leaves. Inside were marble floors, and a slow and stately lift up the five floors. I remember visiting my father there during my holidays and being astonished by Madame Dimier’s ability to pour forth rapid continuous loud incomprehensible French without ever taking breath. It was an artillery of sound that killed off all other speech and covered everything we did, or thought, or saw, or imagined. I wondered how my father, no mean speaker under ordinary circumstances himself, could endure such a perpetual battering of noise. And then I suddenly realised that he had fallen in love with Maman’s voluptuous daughter, Marie-Louise, or Marlou as everyone called her.

Marlou was the most glamorous woman I had met. She was always elegantly dressed, had gorgeous raven hair that was swept back but kept falling forwards, rather pouting lips, and large expressive eyes with hooded lids that fascinated me. Her sultry looks made the climate around her seem warm and relaxing. I thought her the height of sophistication. I liked her too, but felt shy after my father took me to one side and asked me to give her a kiss each night because she was unable to have children of her own. This revelation led to a brief man-to-man talk about the ‘facts of life’ which left me rather unconvinced by the unlikeliness of it all, and wondering whether I had misunderstood. I doubt if, in my nervousness, I was as affectionate to Marlou when she came to say goodnight as I should have been. She took me to various fashion shows and praised my taste; and she gave me a camera with which I took a spectacular shot of the Eiffel Tower, making it appear like the leaning tower of Pisa.

Marlou’s full name was Marie-Louise Deschamps-Eymé. She was in publishing, her business partner being Marcel Brandin, ‘a cool, slim, bitterly disillusioned ex-Resistance fighter’, as the novelist Winston Graham described him, ‘who saw France returning to its old corrupt ways.’ It was in their publishing company, Editions Begh, that my father bought a directorship, using the invalidity money he had been granted by the RAF. He also brought with him an idea, which was to corner the market in translations of books that were being, or stood a good chance of being, made into films. Winston Graham, whose Poldark novels were later to be such a success on television, was one of his early authors; another was the well-respected, now-forgotten novelist Claude Houghton (whose ‘novelisation’ of Jerome K. Jerome’s play
The Passing of the Third Floor Back
was also filmed). Love and money were to be the ingredients of their success, but it was love and money that undid them.