Going Up (3 page)

Moss was never at ease in the post-war world. In Peter Green’s words:

Perhaps Moss, the rolling stone, could never forget the hundreds of Cretan hostages who were shot in reprisal for his and Paddy’s audacious, award-winning exploit.

For non-combatants, the transcendent quality of
literae humaniores
was illustrated in the story of how, as his kidnappers led him through the Cretan mountains, General Kreipe glanced at snow-capped Mount Ida and then,
perhaps in order to pull educated rank on his captors, recited the opening lines of Horace’s Ode 9, Book One:

When Kreipe hesitated over the next phrase, Leigh Fermor took the cue and continued, without pause, to the end of the poem. The general looked at him and said, ‘
Ach
so, Herr Major
!’ Who would not wish to have been as superbly prompt as ‘Paddy’ at that moment? I wonder with what eyes Billy Moss, whatever kind of a Jew he was, observed this time-out-of-war exchange between his commanding officer and a
Wehrmacht
general.

I had been as diligent and house-spirited a Lockite as dread and ambition could contrive. When in office as a house monitor, I called my colleagues by their first names, but after what had happened a year or so earlier, I trusted none of them, even those innocent of overt malice. The version of myself seen or heard in public was carefully edited. I learned from Jeremy Atkinson how to tighten the lips in order to instil dread in the lower deck, as it were; but I was careful not to reveal to him, or to anyone else, anything that might be used against me. I kept a straight enough face to seem to be one of them, and a straight enough bat to get my house colours; but I walked alone, myself and my double.

Cicero’s favourite
clausula
carried the concluding phrase ‘
esse
videatur
’, which we construed as ‘that he may seem to be’, whether one thing or another. While appearing to be a proper Carthusian, I was primed by Mr Maugham to take unforgiving note of my fellows’ forms of speech and personal habits. I did so in a wide spiral notebook, ruled feint, that I had bought in New York City.
A Writer’s Notebook
had shown me how neatly and surreptitiously a man might can his beans before opportunity came to spill them.

D
URING HOLIDAYS FROM Charterhouse, I had contrived to kiss a few girls, on unparted lips. English girls furnished a passive and interminable assault course: one got as far as one could, in a given time, before being stalled. Mona had the biggest, most enticing breasts. I never surmounted them. Two New York girls I dated during ten days in their city in the summer of 1949 were more accessible. Necking in the American style had its limits, but they were elastic. I sailed for England, on the
Queen Mary
, convinced that I was passionately in love with freckled Mary Jane, whom I had kissed deep into the early hours.

After I had returned to my Carthusian monastery, Mary Jane wrote me scented letters, in pale blue ink, on petalled paper, promising full-length proximities when we met again. In the interim, I convinced myself that my true love was the pretty Hilary Phillips, whom I had met, when we were sixteen, at the Liberal Jewish synagogue in St John’s Wood. In a surge of ancestral allegiance, my father had sent me to be prepared for ‘Confirmation’, an anglicised form of Bar Mitzvah, appropriate for assimilated Jews. No Hebrew was required, apart from the ritual
Shema Yisroel
. More ardent in pursuit of Hilary than of hereditary solidarity, I had learned only with
disappointment, in 1948, of the foundation of the state of Israel. Hilary’s family celebration of the end of 2,000 years of Jewish homelessness obliged her to cancel a date on which I was hoping to proceed a button or two lower down the front of her nicely frilled, and filled, blouse.

My parents had chosen to live in SW15 not least because they did not care to be identified with ‘north London’. Golders Green, with its Jewish connotations, stood for everything from which they wished to be discrete. My father neither denied his Jewishness nor was he at pains to declare it. He flinched when called ‘Rayfle’, a pronunciation that he took to insinuate that he was an alien. He insisted on our Raphael being said in the same way as the name of the Renaissance painter and the anglicised archangel. Out in Putney, we did not celebrate the foundation of the state of Israel. Zionism made no call on my father, although he would be pleased when, in 1952, his friend Sir Frank Evans was named British ambassador to Israel. My parents had met Frank and Mary in the 1930s, when Evans was British consul-general in New York. Mary was what my mother called a ‘character’. At a post-war reception at the UN, she was being presented to the guest of honour when her pants fell down. She stepped out of them, handed them, between thumb and forefinger, to her husband – ‘Here, Frank!’ – and proceeded with the polite formalities.

My brunette mother was beautiful enough not to be taken for what she did not deny that she was but would as soon not be called. Irene (the final ‘e’ silent, as in
Goodnight, Irene
) never lost her American accent, but she showed little nostalgia for New York, still less for Kansas City, where her mother continued to live until the mid-1960s. In an access of daughterly loyalty, Irene then persuaded Fanny to cross the Atlantic and spend her remaining years, of which there turned out to be more than a few, at 12 Balliol House.

In 1930s New York, my mother’s bankrupt father, Max, had separated from his wife and come to live in our spare room at 30 W 70th St. Cedric never complained then, nor did he when his deaf mother-in-law moved into the back bedroom that I had vacated in 12 Balliol House. She often
took offence at what she thought she had overheard. My father nicknamed her ‘Canasta-puss’ on account of her addiction to the game, which she had played regularly with ‘the girls’ back in K. C. In exile, the skeletal Fanny smoked incessantly; but even in her nineties she would jump up when I came to the flat. ‘Want a cup of coffee?’ She made quantities of wide, flat, nutty and delicious cookies, in accordance with an allegedly Lithuanian recipe that existed only in her head.

Cedric hated cigarette smoke. Yet he treated Fanny with implacable politeness. Was his self-restraint a form of penance? As we were sailing back to England from New York, when I was already eighteen years old, my mother disclosed that, in his dancing twenties, Cedric had fathered a daughter on a certain Molly Hall, who had been a member of the Baltic Exchange, a rare distinction for a woman in those days. Molly had promised her lounge-lizard lover that she could not have children. A few months later, she informed him that she was pregnant. Cedric’s father Ellis paid for her to go away, less because of the shame of the imminent bastard than because its mother was not Jewish. At some stage during the war, Molly opened a hairdressing salon in Surbiton called
Chez Raphael
. After 1945, she emigrated to British Columbia with her daughter, Sheila, and took the name Raphael-Hall. I have no clear idea why Irene waited so long to break the seal on that previously well-kept secret.

In 1929, Cedric went, on an immigrant’s visa, to sell Shell gas in northern Illinois. He did so with career-enhancing success, although his Oxford accent was not an immediate plus among the area’s filling station managers, many of them Irish. Before catching the boat-train to Liverpool, Cedric had promised his parents, with implacable gratitude, that he would marry the first Jewish girl he met who had a good figure, a pretty face and no moustache. The nineteen-year-old Irene Rose Mauser, who was working as secretary to an architect in Chicago, qualified on all counts.

Though he never thought well of her dancing, Cedric was always proud of Irene’s smartness, in both transatlantic senses, and of her long-lasting
good looks. They met, on a blind date, on a very cold Chicago Christmas Eve, at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. My mother promised that it was love at first sight. She did, however, discover – not long after they were married, in 1930 – that Cedric was still writing love letters to his old dancing partner, Phyllis Haylor. ‘Phyll’ had since turned professional and again won the World Dancing Championship, with a new partner. In old age, when Cedric was broken by ill health, she visited him several times in the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables. Phyll’s lover, the bisexual film critic and memoirist Nerina Marshall, was then living in Manor Fields. She became more friendly with my mother than my mother did with her.

When I was sixteen, my father sent me to the parquet-floored basement of a Knightsbridge Hotel, near Raphael Street, where Miss Haylor and Josephine Bradley and Charles Scrimshaw (a red carnation always in the button-hole of his black tailcoat) taught the waltz, the tango, the quickstep and the foxtrot, quite as if the 1920s had never come to an end. I soon despaired of winning pretty girls by the nimbleness of my chassis-reverse.

My father’s old friend Victor Silvester (whom Cedric called ‘Ginger’) and his ‘ballroom orchestra’ became middle-class household names in the 1940s and 1950s. His strict-tempo slogan – ‘slow, slow, quick, quick, slow’ – applied as much to the nation as to its ballroom dancers: England might be dancing to the music of time, but it was in no great hurry. My father had been invited to become Ginger’s manager when he first assembled his musicians, but he declined; perhaps because it was too risky, probably because the music business was no place for a gentleman. Despite his ‘investments’, a term he applied both to buying shares and to backing horses, Cedric never again had the opportunity to make any unusual money. He had to rely on his salary from Shell. Irene had an eye for bargains and managed always to be dressed fashionably. Since she never threw anything away, she was able, over the years, to retrieve and refurbish what had gone out of style as soon as its turn came round again. When she died, in 2010, at the age of 100, her
wardrobe for all seasons included pairs of double-A I. Miller shoes that she had bought at Saks Fifth Avenue more than seventy years before, all in well-heeled condition.

Despite his steady devotion to Irene (or, when patiently displeased, ‘Reen’), Cedric told me, late in his life, that he did not think that it mattered very much whom one married. Was his indifference the result of being a Stoic, a world champion, a Jew or an English gentleman? He never alluded to his triumphs on the dance floor, but his posture to the world came, I suspect, of what it pleased him to keep to himself: once a champion always a champion, but one must never advertise the fact. Modesty was his only conceit.

Cedric could read Hebrew, but understood little. He made no attempt to teach me or to have me taught. He referred to Gentiles only as ‘the Christians’. Disdain and deference were on equal terms. In his hagiography of Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell suggested that, when young, Leonard Woolf, an Old Pauline, spoke of Gentiles as ‘
goyim
’. I doubt whether any well-educated English Jewish family of the time used that term. In his film
The Hours
, Stephen Daldry portrayed an exasperated Leonard Woolf shouting at Virginia, in broad daylight, on the platform of Richmond station. It is inconceivable that, in the period concerned, he would have raised his voice to his wife, in public, at any hour. The scene would have played better in a whisper anyway.

My father would have considered it outlandish to cleave to a kosher diet, but he did arrive home, now and again, with slices of bread-crumbed cold fried fish that could have come only from an East End delicatessen. He laughed, somewhat, at Jewish jokes, but he seldom told one and he never put on a supposedly Jewish accent. In New York, he had admired Jack Benny but deplored Eddie Cantor. In post-war London, he loved Bud Flanagan, suffered Vic Oliver, ignored Max Miller and liked Sid Field, whom we went to see in
Piccadilly Hayride
and in
Harvey
, in which he played a hallucinating drunk, unfortunately to the life.

The first Jewish story I ever heard, in New York, when I was five or six years
old, was told by Seymour Wallace, one of the racier of my parents’ crowd. It concerned the inevitable Itzig, who, time and again, when his best friend had tickets for the Giants, told him, ‘Shelley, I’d love to come but I can’t; Levinsky’s playing.’ Finally, Sheldon asks Itzig does he really have to love music that much. ‘Music, shmusic!’ Itzig says. Sheldon says, ‘So how come it matters so much when Levinksy’s playing?’ ‘Vot he plays,’ Itzig says, ‘who cares?
Vere
he plays, who cares? But ven he plays…! I sleep vit his vife.’ Another overheard joke, of a similar low order, asked how you play strip poker in a nudist colony. The answer was ‘Mit de tweezers’. That was as near the gutter as I came. A later slightly naughty number must also, I think, predate our passage of the Atlantic: ‘The bee is such a busy soul / He has no time for birth control / And that is why today one sees / So very many sons-of-bees.’ The last line sounds uniquely American; in the 1940s, ‘son-of-a-bitch’ had no current British usage.

Happy to pass for a New Yorker in the 1930s, complete with seersucker suit and panama hat in the summer, Cedric looked no less at home as a conventional 1940s Londoner. In chalk-striped Adamson’s suit, white shirt with cuff-links and detachable collar, bowler hat, leather gloves and silk-sleeved umbrella, he waited each weekday morning at Putney Southern Railway station for the 9.08 to Waterloo. He was pleased to seem not to differ from other City-bound suburban gentlemen; that was the difference between them. They included our Somerville House neighbour Jack Piesse, who might nod at Cedric, but – from Monday to Friday – never said good morning. Yet Jack and his wife Margaret played after-dinner bridge with my parents every Saturday night, at alternating venues.

The handsome Jack was a solicitor for Esso Petroleum. He had had a brave war, from Alamein to Berlin, as a tank commander in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. In the week before Germany surrendered, a
Wehrmacht
soldier swung an unloaded rifle at his head in a dark cellar as Major Piesse was bent double, feeling with his dirk for trip-wires across the concrete steps. The German’s rifle butt crashed against the wall, just past where
Jack’s head should have been. Jack riposted with an upward thrust of his dirk. It was the only time on the long way from Sicily to Berlin when he knew for certain that he had killed someone.

Jack, an Old Tonbridgian, drove a Mark 5 Jaguar and played golf at Royal Wimbledon, where the entry form for new members demanded ‘Name of father, if changed’. My Old Pauline father went by Underground to play at the adjacent Wimbledon Park golf club, which was not so inquisitive. It even admitted Variety actors such as Jeremy Hawk, Sid Field’s straight man in his famous golfing sketch (‘Address the ball’, ‘Dear Ball’, etc.). Hawk wore light-blue golfing attire and a light-blue cap, in which he dazzled female members. My father played regularly with a Jewish businessman called Alec Nathan who was a director of the pharmaceutical company Glaxo. He urged Cedric to buy its shares while they were cheap, but he failed to do so.

On summer days, when the sun shone, Jack Piesse would take his deckchair onto the lawn below the Manor Fields rose beds and render himself a darker shade of brown, an alien form of narcissism in those blanched, insular days. Stephen Potter’s 1952 manual of
One-Upmanship
peddled a put-down to apply to smug, bronzed persons: ‘Mediterranean type!’ If anyone approached him with neighbourly overtures, Jack closed his eyes. On winter evenings, he sometimes invited me to Somerville House to play the board game
L’Attaque
. He had an antique set from his childhood. The pieces wore uniforms from the Napoleonic wars, except for the spy, who had a cloak, a slouch hat and a two-faced Continental moustache.

Once aboard the 9.08, Jack and other commuters would open
The
Times
, with its eight columns of personal advertisements encrypted in small print across the front page, or the
Daily Telegraph
, as a prophylactic screen against encroaching conversationalists. After their arrival at Waterloo, ‘the Drainpipe’ shuttled the City men, like reticent sardines, to the Bank. A Stock Exchange joke of the period told of a woman crossing Threadneedle Street and being all but sandwiched between two buses coming in opposite
directions. All of her clothes were ripped off in the process and she passed out cold. As she lay naked in the street, a chivalrous broker stepped out and covered her private parts with his bowler hat. When the ambulance arrived, its crew looked carefully for signs of injury; then one said to the other, ‘Better get the man out first.’ In his diaries, Evelyn Waugh alludes to a certain Enid Raphael who, so he reported, once said, ‘I don’t know why they’re called “private parts”, mine aren’t private.’ I could wish, but cannot believe, that she was some kind of a relation of mine.