Black Beech and Honeydew (23 page)

I have, of course, given a two-dimensional account of the Lampreys. I have disregarded shattering misfortunes beside which their financial crises are indeed no more than a joke. Nor have I tried to define their Christianity which is unshakable. There was a Lamprey whom in my story, where she appears as a child, I called Patch. Astonishingly, after Patch had grown up, she entered an Anglican nunnery which she always referred to as ‘My Bin’. As a nun she was at once devout and unconventional, losing no chance of exploiting her cockeyed talent for practical jokes. She found she had mistaken her vocation and left before her novitiate had expired
but continued, zealously, in her work for the Church. Essentially, she was a pioneer. She came out to New Zealand, lived on a pittance, founded an active and successful youth club, jollied up her parish, put heart into the aged, astonished the conventional and, as soon as all her pots were boiling satisfactorily, handed them over to her lieutenants and joined a medical mission in South Africa. She was a loving, generous, vulnerable and gallant child with the heart of a lion. I am sure that when she took this step she knew that it was to be her last adventure. They have built a chapel in her memory at the Mission.

But all these events were twenty years in the future when I first went to England in 1928. Patch was a very little girl then and a bit of a terror.

This was the age of
Decline and Fall
and
Vile Bodies.
Although my immediate Lampreys did not adopt the attitudes or conduct of a Lady Metroland or a Miss Runcible and indeed considered that such people went ‘far too far’, yet it must be confessed that those members of the clan who were, as we would now say, way out, might have served as models for Mr Waugh and, of course, they all talked the language. People and things were Heaven or shy-making, and, later on, too shying for words or too delicious, actually. All Lampreys are family-minded and love their young extremely. I remember hearing an aunt describe her favourite little niece in exactly these words: ‘She’s tiny, tiny, tiny tiny with blue blue blue blue eyes.
Too
much.’

For the next five years, this, apart from an occasional interlude with non-aligned friends, was to be the ambience in which I grew into the English scene.

The feeling of unreality persisted. It was as if one lay down on a beach while wave after wave broke over one’s head. This is not to suggest that it was anything but a wonderfully happy time for indeed I was with people in whose company I could never be anything but happy. The older children were home for the holidays, and my godson was now three years old, rather stout, and wholly beguiling. I wrote my syndicated articles, learned that they were becoming popular in New Zealand and began, I think, to develop some appreciation, at least, for cadence and the balance of words.

We were bewilderingly gay: a self-contained quartette driving up to London several times a week for dinner and a play and then going on sometimes to two or three places. ‘Uncles’ was the smart nightclub in those days and there one danced or inched at close quarters with poker-faced revellers of high estate or sat and listened to Hutch, a Negro entertainer whose popularity was supreme. ‘It
couldn’t
have been more fun. They had Hutch and everything.’ Then there was the midnight floor show at the Savoy and a Tzigane band at the Hungaria. We went oftenest to the Hungaria and heard Colombo lead the band and saw him and all the fiddlers throw their bows into the air and shout while a little man like a troll went mad on the tzimbal. Richard Tauber was nearly always at the Hungaria and at some stage in the evening Colombo flourished up to his table and with an ineffable and excruciating leer, wafted a note or two in the tenor’s ear. Sure enough, the plump little hands would extend, the
shirt front inflate and out, mellifluously would come ‘You are my Heart’s Delight’ while Herr Tauber’s partner rested her cheek upon her palm and gazed pensively at her wine. Sometimes the Prince of Wales was there and sometimes Mr Michael Arlen and almost always, alone, at a table just inside the door, sat a strange figure: an old, old man with a flower in his coat who looked as if he had been dehydrated like a specimen leaf and then rouged a little. No one ever accompanied him or paused at his table. He looked straight before him and at intervals raised his glass in a frog’s hand and touched his lips with it.

One night we asked the restaurateur who he was.

‘A poet,’ said Signor Vecchi, ‘and once, long ago I understand, a celebrated personage. It is Lord Alfred Douglas.’

Those were the springtime years of the Cochran shows, of Cicely Courtneidge, Jack Buchanan, Evelyn Laye and Noël Coward. Drawing-room comedies had Nigel Playfair, Lilian Braithwaite, Yvonne Arnaud and Frank Cellier in the leads and nobody thought the worse of french windows. Charlot’s Revue with Beatrice Lillie rioted at the Cambridge. The Lampreys had, for the most part, a gay taste in theatre and I think it was not until I began to explore for myself that I saw the experimental plays of those years.

This came about in August when the Lampreys shut up their house, gave their servants a holiday and went to stay with friends. I spent a short time with an aunt in Kent and a longer one with friends in London and with a most congenial Lamprey who was on the stage and had a house in Kensington. Now, I began to explore. I waited in pit-queues for matinées and came to recognize the street-buskers: spoon-players, a paper-tearer, an errand-boy who lowered the shafts of his cart, executed a brisk routine of handsprings, took round his cap, and was off; the dismal woman who bellowed the story of her life beginning: ‘I was a ninnercent girl,’ and the terrible man with eyes like the Dead Drummer’s who was led by his shifty-faced mate down the queue droning: ‘Bl-i-nd, bl-i-nd’ and collected, I daresay, more than any of them, so anxious was everybody to placate him and get rid of them both. Strangest of all was the man in the raincoat with unfurled umbrella, wild eyes and streaming hair and beard. He walked very fast with long strides,
flourished his umbrella and glared about him. He solicited nobody but shot past the queue and down The Haymarket or Shaftesbury Avenue or The Aldwych or The Strand or Coventry Street. The last one would see of him was the ferrule of his umbrella gesticulating above the traffic.

After these superb preludes I saw a dramatization of Christopher Morley’s
Thunder on the Left,
and, later, the first of the Priestley ‘time’ plays, Pirandello’s
Henry IV
with Ernest Milton and a French tragicomedy called
Beauty
with Charles Laughton. I daresay I have muddled the order of my theatre-going. As I look back there is still a haze over the first year in England so that although individual memories are sharp, sequences are blurred. The first Shakespeare that I saw in the West End was John Gielgud as a very young, petulant and smouldering Hamlet with, or so I thought, enormous promise rather than present achievement.

It was some time before I discovered the Old Vic which in those days was unknown to New Zealanders, but in due course I found my way to the Waterloo Road and became a galleryite at – could it have been? – tenpence a time. At the Vic, we were, I think, in the direct tradition of Elizabethan, Jacobean and Victorian audiences. The police constable on beat in the New Cut always looked in and watched from the back. Students, labourers, tough elderly women, nondescripts, deadbeats, and characters who might have made bombs in their spare time, chewed, drank, smoked and leant forward with their hands on their knees and the stagelight reflected in their faces. We stared down past a strange mechanism like the mock-up of a vast chandelier which hung from the roof outside the proscenium and helped to light the apron and main acting areas. If a player dried he would, as like as not, be prompted in strong cockney from the gallery and if he was inaudible he would be told to speak up in accents that were pellucidly clear to all the house. This sort of treatment, though distressing, is good for actors. The Vic, in those days, thrummed with a coarse, racy life that had no equivalent in the West End.

It was wonderful to be alone and at large in London. One early autumn morning I went by bus into the City and cashed a cautious cheque. I asked the teller what would be a good way to take for exploration and he came out with me to the street. ‘If
you go along there,’ he said, ‘and look up, you will see Gog and Magog. Take the next turn to the left, keep on uphill and see if you know where you are.’ He smiled and nodded. ‘Good hunting,’ he said.

I have the poorest sense of direction and can get lost at the drop of a hat but it doesn’t matter in London: a policeman or shopkeeper or any passer-by will always put you right and will take a lot of trouble about it. I found myself in steep cobbled lanes where draught horses with glossy flanks and rumps strained, plodded and skidded in the shafts of brewers’ lorries. I looked in at a Wren church and peered into some Worshipful Company’s hall. I smelt chemicals, spices, coffee and other exotics that I could not define. I climbed and climbed and had begun to think it was time to ask my way back to the West End when the buildings stood apart, the street flattened and widened and, as unexpectedly as on Arthur’s Pass, seven years ago and thirteen thousand miles away, I looked into another world.

The Tower is a commonplace for Londoners: for me this first sight of it was like walking through one of those doors that in fairy tales always stand ‘invitingly open’. It was like looking down into history. For one thing, although the sun shone, there was a light mist. It treated the keeps and walls as if they were mountains, separating them from their bases and veiling the river beyond so that everything floated a little. A company from the Brigade of Guards drilled in the moat, scarlet on emerald green, and the long, open-vowelled orders thinned by distance, rose above the sound of river traffic and the voice of the City and drifted up to the top of Tower Hill where a New Zealander began to feel London in her blood. I remembered the Esquire Marsh who was something in the Tower and kind to Fox the Quaker. I remembered the Tower was a place of infamy, courage and high stomachs, horror and martyrdom. An ignorant and passionate sense of historical continuity rose up in me. I had the first taste of the extraordinary buoyancy, the sudden quickening of all one’s perceptions, the sense of belonging to, and being carried high, on the full tide of London: an experience that sooner or later comes, I think, to almost everyone who stays there.

I asked my way to the Mansion House and rode in glory on the top of a bus back to Piccadilly.

The Lampreys returned in the autumn and we all re-assembled. By all, I mean the family, my ex-pupil, Bet, the English cadet, Tops, who had been with the Lampreys in New Zealand, the two youngest children, who were not yet at boarding school, the household staff and me. Signs, elusive at first, like an unidentifiable squeak in the bodywork of the bandwagon, gave notice of an approaching crisis.

In the meantime, however, there was an adventure. The children’s mother (to whom I shall refer in future as Charlot) was given a treat by
her
mother and I was included in it: a jaunt to Monte Carlo. All Lampreys adore Monte Carlo. Bet decided to come, too. It so happened that a week before we were to leave, a brother-officer of the Head of the House showed us a wonderful system which he had used with great success when last he had a fling on the green baize tables. This was just the kind of thing that inspires industry in a Lamprey. A domestic roulette was put into instant use. We were to take it in turns to spin the wheel and record the numbers and then come to a sensible and scientific conclusion about the system. Not a second should be lost, said Charlot.

‘We mustn’t be silly and go madly in for it without
really finding out,’
she urged. ‘We must take it in watches at the wheel, not cheat over the results and keep our wits about us.’ Dizzy, she said, would come to our aid. I should explain that there is a legend, based on a complete fallacy, that the first Lord Beaconsfield’s blood is mingled with the Lampreys’. Dizzy is not infrequently invoked.

‘Don’t let’s lose a precious moment,’ Charlot said. ‘To work, girls, to work.’

Can I remember the system? I believe I can.
En plein: – Zéro. Première. Quart. Onze. Dix-huit. Vingt. Et les deux derniers carrés.

It was remarkable how often it turned up trumps on the domestic wheel. You might say there was no sense in it, we told each other and anybody who would listen, but here were the facts. And we would produce lists of figures. It was really very odd we would say, feverishly spinning. I know that in my heart I did not believe in the system and I doubt if either of the others did but – and this was a favourite Lamprey saying – we were having fun. Indeed it was highly
characteristic that an inverted pyramid of close reasoning was owlishly erected upon a phantasmagorical premise.

When the time came for our departure, we counted up how much we could spare for the system and resolved to go no farther than it lasted. Away we went in the morning by the continental from Victoria. That night we slept in the Blue Train.

The wagon-lits and chocolate-uniformed porters, the dining coach, the swift journey out of Paris into the night and the shuttle-glimpses of French families in lamplit rooms: these were my first sensations of Abroad.

In the night I woke often and in ecstasy; the last time to hear outside, on an echoing platform, an incredibly melancholy voice chanting: ‘Marse-i-i-illes’ and to see the light of a lantern bob on the window blind. ‘Marrr-sei-i-illes’.

When we woke up we were on the Côte d’Azur and the Blue Train had taken on a leisurely air. It seemed to dawdle a little by flowery platforms. Not far away was the full postcard blue of the Mediterranean. Villas glared blankly in the sun. Olive trees mounted like smoke up the flanks of the Maritime Alps. Everything shimmered and our coffee and brioches were delicious.

Well: there at last was Monte Carlo. I hadn’t been much of a one for Phillips Oppenheim and William le Queux but I fancy they must have featured in those old
Strand
magazines in Dunedin and perhaps it was some memory of an illustration that made the whole thing conform so precisely to expectations: bland, meretricious and pleasing, like a studio representation of itself. ‘Delicious!’ said Charlot.
‘Such
fun:
do
look.’ And so it was.

We were given three enormous bedrooms opening out of each other. Our balconies overlooked a Franz Lehár backdrop with the marzipan cupolas of the Casino run out against it like a ground row. Edith Wharton deployed her posh Americans in such a setting: there is still an extraordinarily Edwardian flavour in the Monegasque scene.

In the afternoon we enjoyed the siesta, at five we sat under an awning taking tea and appallingly rich patisseries. At eight we dined and at nine walked down the hill through the gardens whose display of flowers in full bloom is said to be effected overnight in buried flowerpots. A blaze of salvia at midnight on Monday. A riot of
petunias at 1.30 a.m. on Tuesday. I’ve never met anybody who has caught them at it but the legend persists and I hope it’s true, it would be so precisely in character.

The French of hotels and places of entertainment seem to have a great liking for colour schemes ranging from chocolate up to ochre and relieved by baby blues and pinks that have gone off a little, the whole being garnished with touches of gilt. So it is, or was, in the casino. Heavy carpets, muted voices, muted smells, muted colours; chandeliers; the discreet click and rattle made by marbles skipping over metal and by croupiers’ rakes dragging in the plaques: frescoes, in a subfusc scheme, of incredibly insipid
bergères:
had I expected something a trifle more rake-helly in the prevailing décor? I think I had. However, as one looked about one in the Salons Privés, there were, after all, footmen placing tables with champagne at the elbows of gamblers who had sizeable pockets under their lacklustre eyes. There were jewelled claws that hovered over the green baize, any number of cigars and heaps of plaques, worth Heaven knew how much, being spread over the playing fields in an idiotic and rather pretty design.

We chose a table and hit Monte Carlo with our system. I wish I could record some wonderful departure from what might have been expected but, no. All that night we were fortunate and the more we won the more we laughed. When we won we tipped and the murmur of ‘Pour les employés. Merci, mesdames.’ rose in a cosy murmur from the croupiers. At about two o’clock on a warm morning we walked back to the hotel and wondered if we would be hit over the heads and robbed of our bulging handbags.