Basil Street Blues (7 page)

They came with one of Minnie’s sisters, Lannie (my father’s favourite aunt) whose husband went off to Australia to make his fortune. He took with him their second son who prospered there and before long was employing his father; but he left in Ireland their elder son who did rather well in the IRA before, things getting too hot for him, he joined his father as a fellow-employee in his brother’s Australian business. Lannie’s daughter Joan, the youngest child, went with her to Maidenhead and was my father’s chief companion in these war years. ‘She was certainly closer to me than my own brother and sister,’ he writes. One thing they had in common was a lack of confidence. Waiting for the fortune her father never made in Australia and for the call to join him that never seemed to arrive, Joan grew up as a poor relation wearing the cast-off clothes of her cousins, all of whom she hated ‘except perhaps myself’, my father adds.

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The happiest days of my father’s life ‘were certainly those between the ages of five and eight – before I was sent to school’, he wrote. ‘I was spoilt by the old Nurse, had a small companion to play with and few worries. Exciting things happened too.’ On good days he and Joan would play together among the flashing birds, amazing fish and small animals at Datchet. On bad days the two of them used to be dragged out from their hiding places and sent together to dancing class, Basil shamefully dressed in black velveteen knickers ‘which showed every mark if one slid around on the floor for a few happy minutes’, Joan in some frock that Yolande or one of her other cousins had discarded. Basil knew how she felt as he had inherited his brother’s rotten toys.

Far better were their games outdoors such as drinking a special brew from an old tin and being tremendously sick. Joan often came to play at Brocket. The gardens there were ‘the nicest part of all’, my father wrote. They were laid out in three tiers with a drop of six feet between them, like a giant’s staircase, and made a magical playground. Along the back of the house ran a stone-paved terrace and against its wall were apricots, nectarines and peaches facing southwards to the sun. The top level of the garden next to the house was the adults’ play area, which is to say it was largely occupied by a grass tennis court, several formal rosebeds and three willow trees overlooking the second garden below. Flanking the tennis lawn, descending pathways followed the line of two boundary walls against which grew fig, pear and plum trees. On the second level lay the kitchen garden, its fruit and vegetables arranged in big squares and with a central path arched with apple trees that joined two curving flights of steps to the third level. Here stood three long hothouses crammed with black and white grapes and exotic flowers. At this lowest level there were also chicken houses with some fifty chickens wandering in and out of the potting shed, garage and coal yard with its wonderful mountain of black coal, perfect for climbing.

These gardens at Brocket ‘were as good as many of the walled gardens in large country houses’, my father wrote. From ‘asparagus to onions, from gooseberries to quinces we had it all!’ He especially liked the black, red and white cherries that gave their fruit in rotation and ‘could have fed a small army of children’. Nevertheless he and his brother would sometimes balance themselves on the top of the potting shed and, using a butterfly net mounted on a long bamboo rod, steal some of the horribly sour cooking apples from the garden next door. ‘It is the only intimate thing I ever remember doing with my brother as a small boy unless you can count watching my father start the car on Sundays.’

Compared with Kenneth who was a massive three, almost a monumental four, years older, and Yolande who, being a year older still, was almost an adult, Basil seemed a Richmal Crompton urchin-child. But he was happy. He had his own tomboy friend Joan and he lived in a secure and exciting world until the war – not the Great War, but that ‘war of my own’ which was fought out at his preparatory school.

Scaitcliffe School had been founded in the early eighteen-eighties by the Reverend Doctor Charles Crosslegh. He chose its rather perilous name after his seventeenth-century family house in Lancashire, taking out a ninety-nine-year lease on Crown land near Windsor Park in which to start a cramming establishment for prospective candidates to the Royal Indian Engineering College. Twenty-five years later it had been bought by Ronald Vickers, a classical scholar who, turning his back on the family armaments and engineering business, converted Scaitcliffe into a boys’ preparatory school for Eton, Charterhouse, Wellington and other prominent public schools. His family was wealthy – several of them had been painted by John Singer Sargent – and he ran a private school ‘because he liked doing it’, my father observed. By the time Basil arrived in 1917 the school had some forty boys and was very much a Vickers family enterprise.

My father’s difficulties at Scaitcliffe were largely caused, he felt, by his brother. Kenneth had actually left the term before Basil arrived, but his reputation stayed on. He had been a great success: doing wonderful things on the cricket and football pitches, excelling as an intrepid diver into the school plunge, performing miracles in the gym and, despite only scraping into the lowest form at Eton, gaining the approbation of the headmaster. This was not easy. Ronald Vickers was ‘a remote austere figure, despite his underlying care and interest’, his son Richard admits in the school history. ‘…Discipline was extremely strict.’ Except for his academic record, Kenneth ‘was everything I wasn’t!’ my father exclaimed. ‘At first my life was absolute hell. I was scared stiff of the bigger boys and when frightened I talked my head off instead of being quiet. I was the butt of the school bullies. My locker was ransacked, my belongings stolen.’

This glimpse of rampageous school life differs from the picture of an extended family presented in the school history. There is no illustration in this book of the most visible Scaitcliffe master, Edgar Ransome (nicknamed Rampoo), but there is a fine description of him which contrasts rather dramatically with my father’s boy’s-eye view at the age of ten. Richard Vickers writes:

Despite his great size – he weighed over 20 stone – he was a slow bowler of considerable skill who regularly attended nets each morning of the summer term. He was also a fine amateur pianist, whose rollicking songs were always an amusing interlude on winter evenings. His class presence was truly formidable, so woe-betide any boy who was slow to learn his tables or whose writing strayed from the line during copy-book exercises.

Certainly he must have had a lasting effect on my father whose writing never strayed from the line until his final illness. Ransome was the junior form master at Scaitcliffe for twenty-six years before retiring to be a tobacconist in Basingstoke. To cover his bald head he always wore a cap, and became ‘pre-eminent’ among the ‘great characters of the school’s early years’. But my father greatly feared and disliked him. ‘I never quite understood how Ransome got a job at Scaitcliffe,’ he wrote.

He was a particularly coarse old man with a large stomach and a big fleshy hooked nose from the end of which hung a permanent dew drop. He couldn’t even speak correctly, so heaven knows why [Ronald] Vickers, a purist, came to engage him.

One of my worst recollections of Scaitcliffe was being made to stand in the corridor for bad behaviour. Should Vickers happen to come along the culprit got six sharp cuts with the cane. Edgar Ransome, who took the lowest class of very small boys, loved to inflict this form of punishment. His classroom was opposite Vickers’s Study door, so the unfortunates were particularly vulnerable.

Basil could not wait for the holidays. During the war, the family spent more time at Brocket, but because of school he was seeing less of Joan. By the age of twelve his best friend had become his dog, a mongrel officially named Pat whom he called ‘Woorah’ – ‘I don’t know why.’ Looking back at this period he was to write: ‘I loved my dog dearly but did nothing for him. Nan [Kate Griffin] fed, sometimes bathed and generally looked after all our animals. My contribution was to reckon up how long he could live and imagine there would be no world for me when he died. And now I can’t even remember how he died or when.’ Knowing as I do his last solitary years with his dog, this passage has for me an almost Johnsonian tone of self-recrimination.

My father’s last year at Scaitcliffe was more tolerable. Memories of his glamorous elder brother were receding and he himself was a bigger boy now – not someone who could easily be bullied or have his locker ransacked. He was playing cricket and football not too badly. He had escaped from Ransome’s form and there were fewer beatings. He had even learnt when to be quiet and not talk his head off. ‘I wasn’t too unhappy,’ he concluded. ‘I kept out of the way.’

I have no photographs of my father at Scaitcliffe, only one of a school group taken in the grounds shortly before he arrived, with my Uncle Kenneth standing eyes half-closed in the back row, and the formidably handsome Ronald Vickers seated at the centre, the solitary adult, with a cricket ball in his hand: an intimidating figure.

*

Between the ages of seven and eleven my father didn’t notice the Great War much. The same seemed to hold true for Fraser. His brother Pat, having been transferred to a regular battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1915, made his Will and went off to fight in France. By 1917 he was back with the reserve battalion and retired after the war while in his forties. It was said in the family that he suffered, this amiable man, from shell-shock and that this was aggravated by domestic warfare. Certainly his career was modest by the standards of the two major-generals, his father and father-in-law, and he seems to have been a disappointment to his wife Coral who, according to my father, taught both their children (in particular their son Ivor) to despise him.

Coral already despised Fraser who took no part in the Great War allegedly on account of his varicose veins. So how, apart from fathering his three children and being ‘of independent means’, did my grandfather occupy himself in the first twenty-five years of his marriage before the big disaster?

At the beginning he seems to have had a notion of taking up the law. On 22 November 1899, some seven months after his marriage, he entered Gray’s Inn (where George Sowley Holroyd had been admitted the previous century), enrolling at the private college run by the Bar Council. The Register of King’s College, Cambridge, has a note of his studentship, and the Uppingham School Roll notes that he went on to qualify as a barrister. Actually he took no law examinations but shortly after the death of his first son he left the college to look after Adeline.

Over the next fifteen years he seems to have done very little but look after Adeline. She needed looking after – indeed she insisted on it. All the children could see what was going on. Their mother got more attention at home than any of them did. She was their rival. Whenever she didn’t get her own way, she would have violent hysterics – like firework displays they were – and Fraser, who was a naïve and kindly man, was pricked with self-reproach. For he had really married the Corbet family, and the barometer of his happiness shot up whenever he was among them
en masse
. Bang wasn’t allowed any of her tantrums when her sisters were around – they teased her too much. ‘What’s the difference between a man and an umbrella?’ her sister Lizzie called out at one of Bang’s bridge parties. All the card players stopped and looked up. ‘Really, Lizzie, whatever are you talking about?’ Bang answered. ‘I’m sure I don’t know.’

‘Well, you damn well ought to – you’ve been under both of them.’

The implication was that sex was as enjoyable for Bang as a rainy afternoon. She lusted instead after a refined life. When none of her sisters were at Brocket, Adeline would put on operatic performances, crying out that she was not long for this world, that people would miss her when she was gone. She would send up many quivering Hail Marys and pray for the good Lord to take her – she was still playing these scenes fifty years later when I was among the audience. Alarmed by her mysterious illnesses, Fraser sent her to many specialists. They gave her their most expensive attention, but the mystery of her illness remained unsolved.

In 1900, after leaving Gray’s Inn, Fraser had been made a director of the Rajmai Tea Company and would regularly see his brother Pat at the board meetings. These meetings were pleasant social affairs, spiced with tales from the East. Pat and Fraser enjoyed spending this time together without their wives.

But everything began to change in 1914. Adeline could not compete with the war. All men had to do something then. So what did Fraser do? According to the Uppingham School Roll, he joined the Stock Exchange. The Stock Exchange itself has no record of his membership. But my father remembered that Fraser had got a job with a shrewd German financier called Lowenfelt two or three years before the war. Lowenfelt started a firm called the Investment Registry in Waterloo Place. It was a lucrative business and Fraser made some money by taking Lowenfelt’s advice to invest in rubber shares. Unfortunately, he did not take Lowenfelt’s advice as to when he should sell the shares, and lost much of his gains after the development of synthetic rubber. Nevertheless he made some profit.

It was probably a mistake for my grandfather to have left the Investment Registry – it was to carry on in Grafton Street and London Wall into the nineteen-sixties. That he did leave was partly due to the uncomfortable sensation of having a German as his partner during this war against the Germans. It had an unpatriotic air. Besides, Lowenfelt was also a Jew which in those blatant days was additionally unpopular in England, though it hadn’t told with Fraser before the war. In any event, listening to others, he seems to have persuaded himself that there was something ‘ungentlemanly’, if not actually illegal, about Lowenfelt’s manipulation of the share market. Lowenfelt was a man ahead of his times, and already Fraser was falling behind the times. My grandfather’s modest success at the Investment Registry persuaded him that he was ‘a safe pair of hands’ in business matters. He debated whether to pick up a more suitable business partner or go it alone, and then steered somewhere between these choices. In 1915 he decided to buy a patent cleaner from a naval captain he had recently met. It was a miraculous machine which, Captain Jennings assured him, would revolutionise the world of house decorating. There was nothing, not even the most dulled paintwork or delicate fabric, that this restorative device, filled with its fizzing formula, could not make new – and so quickly it took one’s breath away. My breathless grandfather wanted to call the new company he created round this machine ‘Brevis’, signifying its amazing speed, but this name had been taken by another company, and so he named it ‘Breves’ meaning nothing at all, which is what he got. He took premises at the Knightsbridge end of Sloane Street, employed some staff and, as company secretary, chose a charming and penniless old man who had been hammered on the Stock Exchange. He had a long white silky moustache, always dressed immaculately in spats, and was devoted to my grandfather for rescuing him from poverty. Like schoolboys, the two of them would disappear behind a locked door to mix buckets of the secret formula which were then reverently handed to the works manager. It took a year, following the unexplained disappearance of Captain Jennings, for them to conclude from the flaking paintwork and faded fabrics that their magic substance, known as ‘the Breves Process’, did rather more harm than good.