Going Up (5 page)

One of my father’s Oxford friends was the
Daily Mail
journalist Guy Ramsey. He was married,
en deuxièmes noces
, as he was liable to put it, to the novelist Celia Dale. Her father James Dale was for many years Dr Dale in the morning radio serial
Mrs Dale’s Diary
. An Old Harrovian, Guy had stayed only one year at Oxford. He then repaired to Princeton, where he claimed to have taken physical exercise for the last time. Playing soccer for a college team, soon after his midday meal, he ran in at over-full speed and scored a brave goal, after which he threw up. His exploit was headlined in the college magazine: ‘FRESHMAN SHOOTS GOAL, THEN LUNCH’.

Guy had the manners, if neither the pedigree nor the means, of a literary grandee. When, after he had signed a cheque, a shopkeeper insisted that Guy prove his identity, the man was instructed to remember which side of the counter he was on. Guy’s claim to a fourteen-point Fleet Street byline was founded on his having scooped the story of where Rudolf Hess was held, incommunicado, after his 1941 solo flight to Scotland. Hess had hoped to please his Fuhrer by conducting negotiations, through the good offices of the 14th Duke of Hamilton, with a view to a German alliance with Great Britain against the USSR.

Such an arrangement might have appealed to more members of the upper class than patriotic histories care to recall. Bolsheviks and Jews (with small distinction between them) were anathema to members of
The Right Book Club
, to which my middle-of-the-road parents had subscribed when we first came to England. Taking ‘right’ to mean correct rather than Fascist, they were treated to books such as Alistair Reed’s
Spanish Arena
, in which Francisco Franco featured as a Christian gentleman. Among
The Right Book Club
’s
selectors was Captain Archibald Ramsay. His anti-Semitism reached great, but never rare, heights of apocalyptic mania. My parents soon cancelled their subscription.

Shortly after landing, Hitler’s deputy was driven south and secreted in a rural hideaway in Norfolk. Prompt propaganda advantage was taken of what was said to be his panicky desertion of a losing cause that, at the time, displayed few symptoms of imminent defeat. No hint was published of Hess’s not unprecedented proposal for an Anglo-Saxon alliance. Hitler’s racism was not likely to be a deal-breaker. ‘Bendor’, the Duke of Westminster, was hardly alone in blaming the Jews for the outbreak of war.

Polyvalent exegetes, with an eye on top tables, have sought to exempt T. S. Eliot from anti-Semitism by making out that he showed untypical symptoms of it only as a result of some temporary aberration. In fact, his attitude chimed harmoniously with that of the High Churchmen among whom he was so eager a recruit, as well as with that of the President of Harvard, under whose aegis he had studied before the Great War. In the 1930s, the hierarchy of the Anglican Church had voted to exclude Jewish refugees from England. The Archbishop of York was alone in raising his hand, if never a loud voice, against the embargo. Anti-Semitism was a popular social attitude until, supposedly, it was not; prejudice can be less a deep psychic trait than a smart button-hole.

After some bounty-hunting official tipped the
Daily Mail
the wink, Guy – who claimed to have local knowledge – was despatched to East Anglia to hound out the exact whereabouts of the fugitive Nazi bigshot. In truth, Guy had been to Norfolk only once before: as a young reporter, he was sent to cover a pre-war trial in which a rustic was accused of having carnal knowledge of a sheep. Returning in the LNER train, an old Fleet Street hand told the young Guy that he was disappointed by the crudeness of the case: he had hoped that the defence would take a romantic line and claim that the rustic had truly
loved
the woolly beast.

Having contacted the
Daily Mail
’s informant, no doubt with prompt cash in hand, Guy was given the address of the castle in which Hess had been secreted. He fattened whatever skimpy intelligence or gossip he could glean into a dramatic lead story that trumped the rest of Fleet Street. Hess’s
sortie came early enough in the war to save his neck at the 1945 Nuremberg trial of the leading Nazis. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, even though he had been closer to Hitler than Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was condemned to death for planning aggressive war. Guy observed that Ribbentrop was more properly
contemned
to death: the one-time champagne salesman’s social climbing in pre-war London society (and the now embarrassing memory of how welcome he had been) denied him reprieve. I sensed a whiff of Ribbentrop in the anti-hero of Thomas Mann’s last, unfinished novel,
The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
. The quality of the champagne that Krull peddles declines as the decoration of the bottles becomes more and more elaborately gilded.

Julius Streicher, editor of the Jew-baiting
Der Stürmer
, was also put to death in 1945. He was crude and loudmouthed, but his anti-Semitic sentiments closely resembled those of the nicely spoken Rothermeres, Londonderrys, Lord Redesdale, Lady Astor and who all else among Britain’s eminent appeasers. In his 1937 bestseller
I Know These Dictators
, G. Ward Price, Guy’s colleague on the Rothermeres’
Daily Mail
, promised his readers that Hitler and Mussolini were more necessary than evil. It is routine for journalists to find agreeable things to say about those to whom they have privileged access. Dorothy Thompson was one of the few who, in the early 1930s, dared to portray Hitler, accurately, as an uncomely person of defective intelligence. She then made the clever, civilised mistake of supposing that this would impede his ascent.

Philo-Semitism did not inhibit Guy from observing that Hitler had succeeded in making the world Jew-conscious. As well as covering big stories (he was adept at empurpling his prose for royal occasions), Guy contributed brief book reviews to the
Daily Mail
. In the six- or eight-page 1940s newspapers, literature rarely commanded more than half a page. Reviewers were expected to cover four or five books in a few hundred words. Although literary journalism was poorly paid, pristine review copies could be sold,
for tax-free cash, at a bookshop adjacent to the Cheddar Cheese, just off Fleet Street, for half their cover price.

If Guy liked books, he loved bridge. ‘The pasteboards’ were Celia’s only competitor for his attention. He played at Crockford’s, where the desk porter could cash cheques of up to £30 without asking questions. Guy wrote frequent, rarely paid-for articles in bridge magazines in which advocates of Acol and the Vienna Club illustrated the merits of their bidding systems with mutually accusatory instances from hands played in recent tournaments.

English post-war bridge circles were riven by the partisans of Terence Reese and of M. Harrison-Gray. Gray’s colourful
Country Life
articles were longer, and more elegantly phrased, than Reese’s laconic, black and white offerings in the
Evening Standard
. The rivals clashed vociferously at meetings of the British Bridge League. So graceless were their exchanges that Guy said that he always favoured whichever of the parties had not spoken last.

Guy’s fondest affectation was to appropriate S. J. ‘Skid’ Simon’s linguistic shorthand: ‘Give tube’, for example, when soliciting a cigarette. Skid may have been inimitable, but Guy could no more resist imitating him than he could that ‘one last rubber’, although he knew that Celia would be tightlipped when he arrived late, yet again, for the supper she had cooked and which I was sometimes invited to share. Guy named their only son Simon.

Skid’s Semitic provenance – his unabridged surname was Skidelsky – had not barred him from representing Great Britain in the 1938 Bridge Olympiad. He distinguished himself in the match against Germany by his flair and sportsmanship. The aristocratic captain of the German team told ‘Skid’ that he wished that he could introduce him to Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer would surely then abandon his absurd Judaeophobia.

Simon died in 1949, aged forty-four. His influence on the bridge world persists both in legend and in his books.
Design for Bidding
and
Why You Lose at Bridge
are probably the clearest, certainly the wittiest, guides to commonsensical play. The latter volume ends with a chapter in which an
archetypal quartet of bridge players – the Unlucky Expert, Mr Smug, Futile Willy and Mrs Guggenheim – is depicted in instructive combat. One meets their descendants at more tables than even their creator ever played at. In collaboration with the journalist and theatre critic Caryl Brahms, who long outlived him, Skid also wrote a series of brazenly facetious novels. The skittishness of
No Bed for Bacon
prefigured the movie
Shakespeare in Love
. In the couple’s best literary number,
A Bullet in the Ballet
, the victim was a leading dancer. A footnote, unmistakably Skid’s, was appended to his name: ‘Don’t feel too sorry for him; his Petrushka was lousy.’ Skid’s wife died, at the age of forty, a few months after him.

The Ramseys were kind enough to appear unsurprised by my ambition to be a writer. They lived in a small, ground-floor flat in Well Road, Hampstead, and had a roster of local friends with whom they held play-readings. Among the supporting cast (Guy and Celia were the Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne of NW3) was their doctor, whom I was startled to hear them call ‘Johnny’. My parents never called our Putney GP anything but Dr Millis. The star figures of the Ramseys’ coterie were E. Arnot Robertson, the film critic, and Marghanita Laski, whose physiognomy gave her voice a singular warp. Arnot wrote several novels (including
Ordinary Families
), but is best remembered for her verses about a name-dropper that began, ‘As I said to Dickie Mountbatten…’

The scholarly and political renown of Marghanita’s family heightened her hauteur as a TV panellist on
What’s My Line?
She also composed segments for the
Dictionary of National Biography
. Her 1949 novel
Little Boy Lost
was one of the few that, at the time, alluded directly, if mutedly, to what was not yet called the Holocaust. She lived, with a husband who was never mentioned, in
Capo di Monte
, a grand house on the top of Windmill Hill. Celia referred to Marghanita and Arnot with complacent sorority. They were the three Fates of Hampstead artistic society.

Guy said of himself that he had a journalist’s skill for putting everything
he knew in the shop window. Unlike my twelve-handicap father, the mature Guy took no exercise other than cutting and dealing the cards. He did, however, retail a golfing clerihew that I have never seen quoted elsewhere:

While he rejoiced in familiarity with the bridge world’s top-class company, Guy was conscious that he never quite belonged in it. His book
Aces All
is a durable tribute to the great contemporary names – Reese, Harrison-Gray, Lederer, Kenneth Konstam, Jack Marx – against whom I came to play, as my patient father’s impatient partner, in duplicate competitions. Although he published only one work of fiction, a Fleet Street thriller entitled
The Spike
(on which the bitch-victim is found impaled), Guy relished the role of literary musketeer. Topcoat slung, with Gasconesque swagger, around his shoulders, he sported the lippy diction and plump pinkness of Robert Morley, the actor and author of
Edward, My Son
, who enjoyed wattled Shaftesbury Avenue fame in the 1940s and 1950s. Mistaken for Mr Morley in West End restaurants, Guy was in no hurry to disclaim preferential treatment, even if it meant tipping the staff more than he could afford in order to sustain the grand illusion.

When Guy read my first jejune short stories, he was generous enough to deplore only gently the unsurprising surprises with which I chose to twist their tails. Celia was less diplomatic, especially when it came to clichés: ‘Cut, cut, cut’ was all her wise and trenchant advice. Mr Maugham had led me to think that familiar phrases made the reader feel at home: his characters found things as easy as falling off a log and were known to cut a long story short. In my lust to be eligible for print, I sent for a book of hints
from the
Evening Standard
. One of them was to avoid static descriptions (for instance, ‘he had black hair’); better to blend them with the action (‘he ran his fingers through his black hair’). I ran corrective fingers through my stories, but they continued to be rejected by the evening papers and by
Argosy
. I was callow enough to read
With the Editor’s Compliments
as an expression of encouragement.

Dinners at 3 Well Road, when I had the Ramseys’ undivided attention, gave me a taste of the literary life never available in SW15. Guy’s aptitude for fanciful imposture led him to cast himself as Gustave Flaubert to my Guy de Maupassant. He would, he assured me, notify me when I had written my
Boule de Suif
and was ripe for publication. Guy rivalled Bartlett in the cosmopolitan repertoire of his quotations. When in north Africa for the
Daily Mail
, he had found himself, like other British journalists, denied access to General de Gaulle. He contrived to send de Gaulle a message, in his fine calligraphy, in which he refurbished Thomas Jefferson’s remark to Lafayette, ‘
Chaque homme a deux pays, le sien et la France.’ Et voilà
: the general’s door was opened to him. None of Guy’s stock of apophthegms was more liberating than Robert Walpole’s (as quoted by Boswell, quoting Johnson) ‘Let us talk bawdy, then all may join in.’

He rejoiced in jokes not current in Mr Love’s Manor Fields. For instance, there was the one about the different responses to sex to be heard on postcoital female lips: the French woman said, ‘Jean-Paul is better’; the Italian woman said, ‘What will you tell your wife?’; the German woman said, ‘Can vee eat now?’; the Spanish woman said, ‘Do it again or I keel you’; and the English woman said, ‘Feeling better, George?’ Another risqué number required Guy to write it out, in his elegant script, like a cryptogram: ‘Fun. Fun. Fun worry worry worry’. Which, being read aloud, yielded ‘Fun Period Fun Period Fun no period worry worry worry’; a not uncommon sequence in the days before the pill.