Everything I Have Always Forgotten (11 page)

Mother used to take me out in the evenings to see the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus. Coming from the velvet black nights of our electricity-free area in North Wales, the cascading, erupting, flashing and bursting, the neon-lined periphery of the Circus was fabulous… it only lacked the clowns and lions of an actual circus.

She took me to Hampton Court, the gigantic palace built by Cardinal Wolsey, starting in 1514. By 1528 Henry VIII had broken with Rome, in part because the Pope refused to countenance his desired divorce of Catherine of Aragon and divested the Church of most of its property, including Wolsey's York Palace and Hampton Court. She told me how her elderly Aunt Isabella (known as Nonina) Howard, who had been granted a ‘grace and favour' apartment in the Palace, was still living there at the time. The great honour was bestowed on her when she was widowed at the death of her Diplomat husband, Esme Howard. She had gone to stay with them when he was British Ambassador to Washington. She said it was a shame that she had not arranged for us to visit the old lady, but we really could not just drop in on her. What she did not mention was the primitive living conditions endured by these grand old people – minimal heat and food delivered in a basket on a pulley!

She also took me to matinée concerts at the Wigmore Hall and Royal Albert Hall. The classical music could seem interminable to a small child, but I suppose I learned to sit quietly all the way through.

To get there, we would take a double-decker bus (how I loved riding upstairs, with its superior, lofty perspective) or the Tube. Both had sprung, upholstered seats covered in a heavy patterned material somewhere between velvet and a sisal doormat. Everyone smoked on the upper deck and in the smoking carriages of the Tube, mostly cheap Woodbines, their fingers heavily stained with nicotine. Men and women were pale and gaunt; their hands shook as they took another drag on their fags. Sometimes they would be talking to themselves or even shouting at no one in particular. I remember asking Mother why they acted so strangely, she replied: “It's the Blitz”. At that age, I had already heard the word ‘Blitz' so much in grown-ups' conversation that I knew exactly what she meant: the 1940-41 intense bombing campaign of London and other major industrial cities by the Germans.

It had left a huge proportion of citizens psychologically scarred for life, just as had happened to the inhabitants of Dresden and many other great flattened centres of population. Traumatic Stress Syndrome had as yet no name, but you can be sure it was prevalent, just as it must have been in the Middle Ages and long before. When we walked in the streets, there were signs of the Blitz everywhere: houses cut in half, so that you could look up to half a bedroom, flowered wallpaper on the walls, a washbasin, ragged curtains flying in the wind, once even a bed teetering on the very brink of the abyss where the floor ended. Other buildings had just disappeared completely, leaving a gaping hole in the ground, a gap in the line of buildings, a missing tooth in a huge metropolitan mouth.

Despite great heroism and extraordinary human kindness between all citizens of every class, many people never did recover from the trauma of the Blitz: the sleepless nights in underground bomb shelters, the double and triple work shifts trying to keep the country going without any young men, digging people and body parts from rubble, cordoning off dangerously damaged buildings, losing one's home, one's place of business. It was not just the soldiers who came out of the War scarred for life, but many citizens too. After the War, Britain was left broke, using 97 per cent of funds from the Marshall Plan to pay off wartime debt to America. The conquered and occupied countries of Europe had not accumulated such debt. War reparations represented only 10 per cent of the cost of the British Occupying Forces in Germany. Britain was broke and remained so throughout my childhood – going from the world's biggest creditor nation to the biggest debtor nation. As the Historian Tony Judt put it: “… post-war Britain would have been familiar to citizens of the Soviet bloc, with its constant queues, ration books and shortages.”

* * *

Robert Graves' deaf son Sam took me to see a Mickey Mouse film when I was perhaps five. Father was furious – he was determined to protect us from ‘trash' culture and had the reputation of being able to smell a comic book if one entered the house. To him, Walt Disney was the anti-Christ while A.A. Milne came a close second with
Winnie the Pooh
. Sentimentality seemed on a par with murder in his moral code. He would find comics (by their smell, we claimed!) with uncanny speed as soon as they crossed the threshold, and then burn them. Sentimentality was purged from the family with Stalinist efficiency to the extent that, bolstered by the ‘grin-and-bear-it' regime of boarding schools, I grew up in the belief that one should not feel emotion. If one did, one should hide the fact like dirty laundry and sex. Emotions are messy. Emotions are sissy. Emotions are feminine. Emotions are illogical. Emotions lead one off the ‘right path'… whatever the ‘right path' is.

So, buried as these feelings were, I came to confuse emotion with sentimentality, love, romance and sex. I spent years of my childhood and adolescence seeking austerity, pushing myself to withstand discomfort: mountain climbing and sailing were perfect trials of endurance. When I was finally seduced sexually, a major
volte-face
in my outlook was introduced in which I had to readjust my childhood misconceptions about sensuality, love and sex.

Sam pretended not to understand what upset Father about the Disney film and went on being his funny goofy self. He cantered like a frisky horse down the streets of London, with little me in tow, talking incessantly and, being stone deaf, quite unintelligibly, very fast, and very loudly.

Father had sold the film rights to his first (highly successful) novel back in the 1930s. Still no film had been made yet and the rights were bought and sold several times until, in the 1950s, Disney Studios purchased them. He went into a deep depression about the fate of the film. Nevertheless, his agent suggested to Disney that the original writer help with the script. Quite unannounced, a large black car (with driver) arrived in Wales, all the way from London. It brought three hot staffers ‘whiz kids' from Disney six thousand miles away. Father courteously welcomed them and told Mother there would be company for dinner and asked her to take care of their driver while he gave the Americans glasses of Sherry. Almost at once things went wrong when one of the men enthusiastically grabbed Father by his lapels and said: “But you don't get this story, we'll make it into a comic farce with guys slipping over and falling around… it'll be a real comic wow…” Father made the rounds of his guests once more, this time calmly but firmly removing their scarcely-touched glasses. He said: “And now, gentlemen, you shall leave and never trouble me again with your infantile stupidity.” They left into the dark night, the way they had come. Disney gave up on the project and sold it to another studio that finally produced it starring Anthony Quinn. Father was mostly a quiet man, but huge in the indomitably of his forceful determination.

Back then, houses in London were still heated with coal fires in each room. The resultant smog (the capillary action of soot particles attracting the water droplets of natural mist) in winter could be so dense that one could not see one's own feet, but had to slide them along looking for the edge of the pavement. Years later, when I worked briefly in an office in London, it was not much better – taking the bus home in the evening, the driver would sometimes pull to the side of the street and ask for a volunteer to guide him. I often did that job, recalling the very early days of motoring when horseless carriages were obliged by law to be preceded by a man on foot with a red flag. Furthermore, I wore a white handkerchief in the breast pocket of my suit (as was the fashion) and when I got home and took it out, the exposed part would be grey with smoke particles while the hidden part was still white.

To this day, if I smell coal smoke it brings tears of nostalgia to my eyes, but what ravages pollution brought to millions of lungs is frightening – the equivalent of a two or three pack-a-day smoking. Indeed, ‘nostalgia' may have been another word for an addiction to coal smoke… since I breathed so much of it. Besides, most people smoked as well. Three of us, among my siblings, were asthmatic, which is hardly surprising. They went on being asthmatic for the rest of their lives, but I was lucky: it disappeared when I was twelve. For the next forty years I believed I had been ‘cured' of my asthma by being beaten each time I came in last in the school winter cross-country running races. My lungs would seize up with the icy air – as if filled with cement, and I would have to stop to gasp and vomit. Later a doctor told me that asthma often leaves you at puberty.
Q.E.D.

Mother, being married to a successful novelist, gave ‘brilliant' parties in those upstairs stables, attended by some famous intellectuals of the time. Painters, writers, actors, architects and even a few politicians attended. I remember young Peter Ustinov snogging with a new girlfriend. The architects Max Fry and Jane Drew were always lively additions to any party. Lance Sieveking, an old friend, now with the BBC, was over 6'6” and Mother said he was oversexed – I treated all very tall men with circumspection for some time after hearing that. I imagine he had made an unwanted pass at Mother. Robert Graves and his wife Beryl never came, because they now lived in Deià, Majorca and certainly would not be in London in the winter. Alan Sillitoe, also lived there and though friends with Graves, had not yet struck up his friendship with Father.

The production team from Ealing Studios (with whom Father had been working on a couple of film scripts) also came to these parties: Monja Danischevsky, T.B. Clarke and Charles Frend, who had all been to Wales to encourage him to actually finish a script. In fact, as far as my young eyes could see, they all got tipsy and acted out hilarious scenes together while crippled with laughter.

To my eyes the best of those parties included charades, with some of the shyer young actors wearing masks we'd received for Christmas. One of these masks resembled my Parents' friend and neighbour in Wales, Bertrand Russell. ‘Bertie' raised howls of laughter when worn on the face of a shy young cousin. He was one of four children brought up in European Diplomatic circles, all perfectly quadrilingual.

Father complained that his friend (they had dined together several times at a Copenhagen Pen Club meeting) Evelyn Waugh never came to these parties on the pretence that he was ‘too old' – though he was three years younger than Father. Other guests included my godfather, Teddy Wolfe, a Bloomsbury painter – as well as Amabel and Clough Williams-Ellis from Wales. Clough always dressed in long jackets like frock coats, cravats and breeches with bright yellow stockings of heavy wool knit. He was an energetic, impetuous man who, well into his nineties, drove much too fast. He once killed a sheep on the mountain road when racing to catch a train. With no shepherd in sight, he pinned his visiting card to the deceased sheep and sped on. Goronwy Rees was another very lively addition. The proceedings were uproarious, but were they brilliant? Or were they just well lubricated with alcohol?

CHAPTER X

DYLAN

E
ven at my young age, I noticed that one person in particular was never at these parties:
the
Thomas. I was bewildered, because Mother loved to regale guests with tales about Dylan, so I asked her why he was not invited. She brushed off the question by saying that, since the war, his alcoholism had become too much to put up with. Recently, while visiting Laugharne (the model for his most celebrated work:
Under Milk Wood
) in South Wales – where my Parents had lived before the war and been particularly friendly with Dylan, I believe I came nearer to understanding what really happened.

First of all, it seems that Dylan met Caitlin (his future wife) at my Parents' house. They had invited Augustus John and Dylan for the weekend. John arrived in his big car and a date: Caitlin.

After lunch, at which John had noticed how interested Caitlin and Dylan had become in one another, John told Dylan that the two of them were going for a drive. The poet timidly objected, saying he wanted to stay home and write (as in: “Go for a lonely walk with Caitlin”.) Well, Dylan was a small man and always broke. John was a big man who drove a big car. That was why he was known by his surname. It was NOT an Optional Invitation. They went for a drive.

Twenty miles away, John stopped the car, leant across his passenger's legs and opened the door for him: “This,” he said “is where you get out and walk.” Dylan protested, but there was no contest. Dylan went to the nearest pub. He was small and always broke, so people always referred to him by his first name. As it turned out, of course, the scribbler got the girl, while the dauber returned to his perpetual quest for conquests.

Dylan once told an interviewer that he lived in Father's potting shed… poetic licence, for in fact he lived in a pretty little house called ‘The Boathouse' a few doors away from my Parents' house – the house with a ruined medieval castle in the garden. Then he and Caitlin moved to a cottage across the estuary, with no telephone and probably no electricity.

Not that all my Parents' hospitality was for intellectuals or the upper class. Father wrote out invitations by hand for every fisherman and cockle man or woman (many of the cockle-pickers were indeed women), inviting them all to dinner at the Castle House.

He later said that a quite remarkable quantity of beer was consumed that night! I remember the piles of empty cockle shells down by the waterfront and the smell was not a savoury one. I came across a jar of preserved cockles in a shop and asked Mother if she liked them. “It all depends where they come from,” she replied, reading the label. When she saw they were bottled in Laugharne, she said: “Certainly not! They would leave the fresh cockles out on the dock in the sun for days on end and then wonder why people got sick eating them.”