Basil Street Blues (22 page)

My father’s marriage to Marlou caused no surprise at Norhurst. He was known to be hopeless over women. First a Swede, now a French woman – my grandparents almost laughed out loud, and my aunt nearly joined in. But when Kenneth married, the same year as Basil, they fell back into tortuous explanations involving his long imprisonment (wedlock being in their experience another form of imprisonment). After all, as my grandmother reminded us, Kenneth was only in his mid-forties, ‘no age at all for a man’. The infinite perambulations of his speech had not prepared us for such precipitate action. We were all thoroughly shocked, and went about the house tilting our heads, clucking our tongues and raising our eyebrows to the ceiling. In the family saga, Kenneth had seemed cast for a similar destiny to Yolande. Like her, he was on the verge of matrimony in the nineteen-thirties: and then it all went wrong. He was one of the admirers of ‘Brownie’ Hollway, the beautiful daughter of a distinguished Rajmai Tea director – indeed he appeared to be engaged to her. But when he introduced her to one of his younger aristocratic friends, she suddenly ran off with him and, at the end of 1939, became the Marchioness of Tavistock. That may have been one reason Kenneth was so keen to get abroad quickly in the war.

After he returned, having survived so much illness and danger, he found that Brownie Tavistock had recently died. And it seemed to us watching him, so frail and spectral, that his adventures must now be at an end.

He shared a London apartment at Nell Gwynn House with two ex-prisoner-of-war friends, one of whom got him a job in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. There was a strong bond between these ex-prisoners, quite a few of whom were to die within a year of one another from the same cause (cancer of the pancreas) brought on by their prison diet. Their reunions became a way of recovering the years they had missed. At their parties it was almost possible to believe that there had been no war and everything was continuing without interruption from the nineteen-thirties. Time itself was cheated and all wounds healed.

During one weekend tennis party at a house on West Heath in Hampstead, Kenneth met a woman in her early thirties called Sheilah Sayers. She was the widow of devil-may-care ‘Mike’ Sayers, a spectacularly good-looking and popular Irish sportsman and army officer who had been killed in an air crash at the end of 1943. When she met Kenneth three years later, Sheilah was living in St John’s Wood with her two young sons. Mike Sayers had not been a rich man, but Sheilah was an heiress – one of the three daughters of William Lawrence Stephenson, founder and first chairman of Woolworth.

She lived pretty grandly in those post-war years with a resident cook, a maid and governess, a gardener, daily cleaning woman and half a boilerman whom she shared with the musician Sir Thomas Beecham. But what some of her suitors did not know was that her millionaire father disapproved of inherited wealth and had taken no steps to avoid the full rigour of death duties (then set at eighty per cent).

Though she was beginning to put on weight, Sheilah was still a good-looking woman and it soon became obvious that Kenneth adored her. He seemed quite unlike the regular pack of admirers who escorted her to theatres and cocktail parties. He was not keen to spend her money – indeed he appeared embarrassed by their financial incompatibility. His gentleness too impressed her as romantic, and her two boys almost hero-worshipped him. But what really touched her was his need of her. Without her love, it appeared, he had no future.

We all went up for the wedding in September 1947 and there is a picture of us standing in a group before the Marylebone Registry Office. I am at one end of the front row wearing my light suit and dark shoes, gawky, smiling faintly but not knowing what to do with my arms. Also in the front row are my new step-cousins, Christopher (who has forgotten that he is being photographed) aged nine, and Michael (who is giggling) aged seven. Old Nan, whom they call ‘Big Nan’, looms hugely between us in her coat. In the back row my father, temporarily wifeless, is wearing his Old Etonian tie. Further along are Adeline, in a tall improbable hat, and Fraser, the very image of a storybook grandfather. The rest of the group is made up of Sheilah’s family whom we don’t know. At the centre are Kenneth, whom Sheilah’s family all call ‘Larry’, looking handsome and serious; and Sheilah herself, a little wary in her brilliant silk dress.

But there is one figure missing. Yolande is not there. She was of course invited and I feel sure she went. But she has missed the critical moment, as she often did, as if it were another meal to be avoided, as if there were a dog to be exercised, as if the implications of it all were too painful.

At the far right of the wedding group stands Bill Stephenson, an active-looking man who is glancing across at the rest of us. He has just given his new son-in-law a cheque for £100,000 (roughly equivalent to two million pounds at the end of the century) to ensure that he will be financially independent of his wife.

Kenneth was to use this money in two different ways. After the birth of his daughter Vicky in 1950, he left Anglo-Iranian Oil and bought a 300-acre farm in Sussex, hoping to combine a healthy life for the children with a modest profit-making enterprise. But this romantic notion never really worked. The children loved the farm, but after the boys left it became more of a ‘gentleman’s estate’, like a comfortable prison camp, where Sheilah grew fat and idle and shut herself off from visitors.

Kenneth used some of his capital to rescue Fraser who had been obliged to raise a double mortgage on Norhurst to pay my school fees. Kenneth paid off these mortgages, bought the freehold of the house for £2,750 and then handed Norhurst back to his father. He also bought back all Fraser’s shareholding in the Rajmai Tea Company, invested in it himself and became a director.

So for a brief period it seemed possible to believe that the family fortunes were restored. At any rate my father felt optimistic enough to send me on to Eton.

I left Scaitcliffe at the end of the summer term in 1948 – in fact I left two weeks early. My father wanted us to travel together to the South of France for a holiday with Marlou. I resented this premature leaving bitterly, being unable to say a proper goodbye to my friends Christopher Capron and John Mein. My father, perhaps sensing this, presented John Mein with a wonderful French banknote. ‘I miss Holroyd very much,’ Mein wrote to his mother the next Sunday. I was almost in tears as I handed over a book on the Arab Legion as my farewell gift in the headmaster’s study – that same study from where I had briefly brought the whole school to a halt with my howl of unhappiness.

About a year or eighteen months after I went to Eton, my father found he could no longer afford my school fees. He had almost bankrupted his own father who was gradually being raised to the surface and floated again by Kenneth. But this was a vessel without treasure and there was precious little more help to be salvaged from Norhurst.

In his novel
The Directors
, the character based on my grandfather, head of a business company (i.e. family), is accidentally killed through the inept financial machinations of a junior director. There is no doubt that my father felt uneasy over borrowing money from Fraser. But the very last thing he wanted was to remove me from Eton, as he himself had been removed. I must complete what he had begun. So he turned to my mother and her husband, Edy Fainstain. It cannot have been easy for him. ‘Edy paid half your Eton fees,’ my mother wrote. ‘Edy loved kids so he gladly stepped in so that you could finish your education.’ There is no mention of Edy’s assistance in my father’s account.

I soon noticed around this time that Edy was beginning to question me about the nuances of cricket. Were leg-breaks as painful as they sounded? Could you get far with long-hops? Were yorkers invented in Yorkshire? His middle-European accent combined with much gurgling laughter did not unsettle me as Kaja’s
lorgnette
had done, and I did my best to respond to these overtures of friendship. But my answers were often lack-lustre. I think we liked each other, but we belonged to different cultures and talking together was rather like walking uphill. We were soon out of breath, having run out of things to say.

To prepare me for my first summer at Eton my father had asked the greengrocer in Maidenhead High Street to give me a few nets while he himself made one of his last forays to sort things out in Paris. In the corner of a large field one evening, this greengrocer sent down a vicious outswinger that clipped the edge of my uncle’s bat. Sparks seemed to fly in the dusk. He bowled again and I saw the bat, like an old ship in a tempest, begin to break up. There was nothing I could do – there never had been. By the end of my net practice my wicket was intact, but my uncle’s bat lay splintered and demolished. The pads too were sprouting strange yellow and grey matter. On the way back to Norhurst, I heaved the wreckage on to a rubbish dump. It was the end.

My reputation as a chap who might force a draw from an impossible position had travelled to Eton before me, and I was immediately placed in the top game. What happened I have described in ‘Not Cricket’.

Approaching the crease in my gleaming new gear I seemed to be walking on air. Where was my ballast, my anchor?… My new bat wouldn’t keep still. It sent the first ball I received for an astonishing four through the covers. I felt like apologising. After all I had done no more than contemplate a cover drive: the bat had done the rest. To the second ball it offered a leg-glance, and I walked off the field while the wicket-keeper righted my leg stump.

This was disappointing for my father. He had done his bit in the war and, when acting wing-commander, had worn a series of gleaming blue stripes up the arms and across the shoulders of his uniform and around his hat. Now he was a civilian again, he looked forward to reflected glory from my Etonian accomplishments. In his generous imagination, he saw me scoring for the Oppidans at the Wall Game, captaining the Field Game, distinguishing myself against Harrow at Lord’s. I performed none of these noble deeds and there was very dim glory for him to bask in. I doubt whether my stepfather understood the enormity of my failure. Boys went to Eton in the hope of being capped with amazing colours, quartered or striped, and walking the streets under a halo of athletic glamour, shimmering with their cream blazers trimmed with blue, their high collars with butterfly ties, their exotic flowered waistcoats. They didn’t go, for heaven’s sake, to learn algebra, but to shine in this fancy-dress parade. However, I pretty well gave up cricket, never rowed, played almost no tennis (largely because I couldn’t find the tennis courts), and never saw, let alone took part in, the famous Eton Wall Game. And I was no good at algebra either. Was I there at all? I sometimes wonder.

One of the troubles was my housemaster, R.J.N. Parr. There was really rather a lot of him, some sixteen stones approximately, all of it signifying very little. He was a portly, well-waistcoated and bespectacled man, and had a very red face. Everyone called him Purple Parr. He was rumoured to be some relative of Catherine Parr, Henry VIII’s last wife, and was himself married to a very thin widowed lady from Ireland, Mrs Murphy, whose meagre glamour we occasionally glimpsed, but who took no interest in the house or its boys. Purple Parr, so far as we could discern, took only a remote interest in us. For a man of his bulk, he spoke in a curiously soft voice muffled by continuous catarrh. In the evenings, like some amphibious monster, he would glide quietly along the perspiring corridors, occasionally stopping, entering a room at random and lugubriously passing the time of day. These sudden appearances, their pointlessness, and the nasal snuffling that would sometimes erupt into hooting volleys of sneezes, were mildly disconcerting. By trade he was a mathematician, but he also took us for Latin in pupil room – a sort of homework. As a teacher he was uninspiring, as a housemaster damp and undynamic. His main interest appeared to be ‘real tennis’ as opposed to what he called ‘lawners’ – the sort of stuff they played at Wimbledon. He would sometimes introduce this or that arcane aspect of real tennis – the origin of the ‘Dedans’ or the significance of the ‘Tambour’ – as a means of initiating an informal conversation. He was, it now occurs to me, a shy man and probably insecure. He appeared more at ease with furniture than boys – indeed he loved good furniture. His long letters to our parents showed that he noticed far more than we realised, distanced as we were from him by his unsympathetic qualities of pedantry and snobbishness.

We felt more comfortable with ‘m’dame’, the house matron Miss Grieve, a cheerful woman with dumpy legs, who spent her summer holidays on the Isle of Wight. I only once saw her seriously rattled. At lunch one day I heard myself uttering the words: ‘the caper sauce is capering, m’am’. The meaning of this remark, beyond its experimental play on word-sounds, I cannot now decipher, nor I suspect could anyone else at the time. But, caught unawares, and feeling that they must contain some impenetrable impoliteness, possibly even a profound obscenity (the food was certainly not good), Miss Grieve reported me for insolence.

Purple Parr was a comparatively new housemaster and had inherited his house in its vintage years. When I arrived in the autumn of 1948 it still possessed a tremendous reputation. The dining-room glittered with the trophies it had won on the river. At the centre of this display stood the magnificent Aquatic Cup itself, a proud mass of silver. But over my first year, as we were bumped or bravely beaten in one race, then another, these cups, shields, medals, honours were removed until we were left with nothing at all. We entered the nineteen-fifties, by popular consent, as the worst house in the school. This is no empty boast. I write with authority. For two years, despite playing no games, I was the Captain of Games; and in my last half, despite an indifferent academic record, I was also Captain of the House.

Carlton, Holroyd, MacLeod, Philipps, Valentine: those were the new boys in September 1948. Our parents came with us the first afternoon, and were given tea and cake by Purple Parr in the drawing-room which, on the other side of a green-baize door, was to be a world away from our ordinary life at Eton. They shook hands, these adults, joked and laughed, then slipped guiltily away. It was as we were standing around indecisively afterwards that someone said something to me. I jumped back, not being used to such attention (indeed having gone a long way in the last year or so to avoid it), then saw it was Philipps who had spoken to me. He still had some cake in his hand and was asking me about my uncle’s bat. I recognised him. He was a large crouching sort of boy, with a round face, hawk-like nose, hanging arms and intent brown eyes. Through his feet most of my sparse totals had trickled on the occasions when Scaitcliffe played Sunningdale. I had seen him with cake in his hand before, at our tea intervals, and I remembered his alert yet curiously blank expression. He appeared to miss nothing, while taking no part in anything. I told him about my uncle’s bat and he immediately understood. During a walkabout round the school on which Purple Parr led us early that evening, we got talking and I learnt that his parents, like mine, were divorced. Over the next five years Griffy Philipps became my special friend.