Going Up (6 page)

Guy’s style was his content; he endorsed the view of the aloof pundit
Terence Reese that, in life as in bridge, a self-assured posture supplemented the effectiveness of the cards in his hand. Reese had been awarded a First in Greats and had a good measure of Oxonian
morgue
. Guy reported that while Terence was playing bridge at Crockford’s during the Blitz, a panicked member burst into the ten-shilling room to announce that the Germans had just hit the War Office with their latest stick of bombs. Terence said, ‘Not on purpose, surely.’

At the table, Reese was a renowned master of ‘squeeze’ plays. When, improbably, he got married, his regular bridge partner, Boris Schapiro, put it about that, after playing cards all evening, Terence went reluctantly to bed with his bride. ‘Halfway through, everything stopped. Mrs Reese said, “Something wrong, darling?” Reese said, “I’ve just realised: if I’d only ducked the first diamond, I could have squeezed East and made that six no trumps.”’ The wall-eyed, long-lived Boris was a renowned
coureur de femmes
. In
Aces All
, Guy reports that, on being introduced to a good-looking woman, Schapiro’s standard opening bid was ‘How about a spot of adultery?’ While dining with an ostentatiously
décolletée
woman, he passed his knife across the table to her neighbour and said, ‘Cut me a slice.’ Also a redoubtable horseman, Boris lived dangerously and continued to be cavalier well into his nineties.

Guy was forever playing the part of someone better-known and better-heeled than he was. He made commonplace phrases more trenchant by initialising some of the words: if he thought you were right, he would say, ‘I couldn’t A with you M.’ In another register, he referred to Jesus as ‘The late J. Christ esquire’. With her thick-lensed, circular and wire-rimmed spectacles, Celia was no beauty; yet there was an attractive contrast between her prim, often dowdy, appearance and her naughty giggle. Her tongue carried an accurate sting: a friend’s chubby son was said to resemble ‘the bacon-slicer at the Co-op’. She wrote with affectionate, pitiless familiarity about the lower middle class. Her mother showed people to their seats in
the Apollo Theatre and brought them tea and biscuits at matinées. Celia had been the editor Arthur Christiansen’s secretary in the great days of the
Daily Express
. Its master of the subtle arts, James Agate, spoke well of her youthful fiction, under a 26-point headline.

In his heyday, Agate was a feared, egotistic, homosexual literary and theatrical critic. Michael Ayrton told me how, when he was nineteen and had just designed John Gielgud’s production of
Hamlet
, he met Agate, in the Underground. Agate saluted the young genius and tested the waters by saying, ‘I don’t know whether you would be interested, but I have a pair of Edmund Kean’s nail-scissors in my flat, if you’d care to come up and see them.’ The incurably heterosexual Michael declined the invitation.

I am sure that Guy – after a sorry first marriage with a German lady – was never unfaithful to Celia; but he gave the impression of knowing his way around women. Soon after I left Charterhouse, he advised me never to forget that, as Zola had dared to imply in
Nana
, the tongue could be a more durable organ for satisfying a woman than the penis. Her fellow courtesan Satin offered Nana practical proof. A Fleet Street joke of the period gave as an example of a physical impossibility ‘two Lesbians whistling while they work’.

My father never offered anatomical advice; nor did he read foreign novels. His fictional reading was limited to the monthly selections of the Reprint Society. I do, however, recall him giving me Edmond Fleg’s
Why I am a Jew
, on which he made no comment. When Cedric was in agony, from yet another attempt to cure the stricture in his urethra, Pat Cotter prescribed C. S. Lewis’s
The Problem of Pain
, which he took with a glass of Robinson’s lemon and barley water. It failed to convert him to Christianity. At Oxford, my father had belonged to the society for the destruction of Keble: they extracted bricks from its ugly, blushing walls. Cotter was the eighth-form Classics teacher at St Paul’s, a croquet international and the
Financial Times
bridge correspondent. My father said that he was ‘almost the nicest man in the world’.

My parents brought with them from New York a complete set of the works of Charles Dickens, bound in tooled leather, the voluminous red and black fruit of a special offer in the
Herald Tribune
. At Christmas, Cedric paid tribute to
A Christmas Carol
or to
The Pickwick Papers
, rather as he did, less regularly, to the Day of Atonement by fasting. He considered nothing funnier than Tracy Tupman’s call of ‘Fire, fire’ after Mr Pickwick had fallen into the pond while skating on thin ice. I smiled, but I did not laugh. Mr Micawber’s philosophy did not amuse me any more than Betsey Trotwood’s cry of ‘Donkeys’. Dickens’s padded and buttoned prose recalled the heavy brown furniture in my great-aunt Minnie’s Oakwood Court drawing room. Dickens may be the stuffy British idea of ingenious fun, but I have never quite forgotten that Fagin was part of it.

Apart from Mr Maugham (how long before I met one of those shameless women of his who were ready to ‘pop into bed’?), the English-language novelists I favoured were Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway, both available for a few shillings in orange Penguin editions. I learned from ‘Red’ Lewis (nicknamed for the colour of his hair, not of his politics) how dialogue could catch the spirit of a character and convey tones and attitudes without additional prosaic verbiage. Although we had left St Louis when I was three years old, I recognised the inhabitants of
Main Street
as if I had spent many dull years in Gopher Prairie. I have never laughed at P. G. Wodehouse.

During my protracted adolescence, I carried a book wherever I went. I got through
War and Peace
as I walked between sixth-form classes at Charterhouse (Skid Simon and Guy Ramsey made a habit of reading while crossing the road). Books offered ticketless escape from what Byron called ‘the tight little island’. The red-covered Penguin translations of Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev allowed me to emigrate spiritually before I could afford a practical ticket. In the months before I went up to Cambridge, Jean-Paul Sartre was my magic carpet to Paris. Although I cannot spell out
why existentialism was a humanism, as Sartre claimed, I shall never forget that one of his female characters had a triangle of red pubic hair.

Maugham declared, in
The Summing Up
, that he achieved literary success thanks, in particular, to a talent for dialogue; so too had Dumas
père
. I suspect that Willie’s stammer made him a good, and retentive, listener. Later, alone, his fingers were quietly but unhesitatingly chatty. Facility for clever dialogue may owe more to a keen ear than to literary refinement. As Maugham had proved, the theatre – where dialogue was king – was a living, and a good one. The mind’s eye furnishes a scene, but the mind’s ear brings its performers to life. Maugham first came to England when he was eight years old. French was his first language, as American was mine. The need to assimilate obliged an alien to be a quick learner when it came to vowel sounds and vocabulary if he wished to avoid the scorn (or solicit the applause) of the natives. Conformity and mimicry, emulation and duplicity go easily together, irony their likeliest solvent.

Among my parents’ books was
Play Parade
, a compendium of Noël Coward’s plays, including
Private Lives, Design for Living
and
Cavalcade
. I noted how few words there had to be on the playwright’s page and how few pages could constitute a play. In our early teens, Dorothy Tutin and I alleviated the flatness of our suburban lives by reading the parts of Elyot and Amanda, Coward’s enviably cosmopolitan lovers. Side by side on my parents’ American three-seater couch, we rehearsed chaste sophistication. Coward’s skittish licence offered no cue for serious kissing.

In the last weeks of 1949, I knew no better means of allaying suburban solitude than taking the 74 bus to go to a drama group at the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John’s Wood. My parents’ piety was limited to paying their subscription. In return they received the monthly newsletter and the right to be buried in Willesden Cemetery, in a part of north London where they would never have considered living. The Alumni Drama Group was amateurish, even to an amateur whose greatest credit was to have played Osric in the
Charterhouse school play, in which I persuaded my fellow Lockite, Robin Jordan, to play Hamlet. Soon afterwards, he was the successful candidate for the Holford Scholarship to Christ Church that I had hoped for. There were several girls, of varying charm and dimensions, among the synagogue alumnae.

Before long, I asked the well-made daughter of a Golders Green dentist to come to see Hermione Gingold and Hermione Baddeley in Coward’s
Fallen Angels
. Pat arrived in the foyer wearing a flounced skirt (her legs were not her best point) and a Tyrolean blouse, its laces criss-crossed over the proud constriction of her cleavage. When she failed to be amused by the clowning of the two Hermiones (she clicked her tongue, three times, in ritual disapproval), I lost my appetite for her undoing. The Master himself was, it had been reported, displeased by the Hermiones’ mugging, quite as if his camp comedy had been travestied by their shamelessness, rather than rendered more hilarious than even he could ever have imagined. The most memorable moment was when la Gingold took off one of her high-heeled shoes, plunged it to cool in the champagne bucket, and then limped around the stage in absurdly dignified disequilibrium.

I returned to the drama group in the hope of better pickings. Its leader was a large, lively, bespectacled female (too grown-up to be a girl) called Jacqueline Weiss, a PhD in clinical biology. I described her as being dressed in ‘loose covers’, which I liked to presume amused her. The group was planning to do a production of Coward’s
Hay Fever
. I was allotted the part of Simon. We were about to begin a read-through when a slim, dark-haired, black-eyed, beautiful girl in a green mackintosh and flat black shoes came into the rehearsal room. She had not attended previous meetings and was not known to the company. Her name was Betty Glatt and when she smiled – although it was not, at that moment, at me – so did I.

I
N THE 1950s, the lure of amateur dramatics lay in the hope of rehearsing kisses more passionate than were likely in everyday practice. Since Betty and I were cast as brother and sister in Coward’s play, that opportunity was denied me with her, for a while; but we soon found time to talk, at length. I had never met a girl at once so sure of herself, so bright and so lacking in conceit or caution. She appeared to have no problem in enjoying life. When she asked whether I was going to university, modesty did not forbid me to tell her of my award. Her eyebrows gave a lift of surprise and interest. She had just graduated from London University. Now at secretarial college, she had been a scholar in history at Westfield. They had wanted her to stay and do research, but she chose to be a woman. Her parents had a drapery shop in Marylebone High Street. Sylvia Betty was born in the flat upstairs. They now lived in Willesden. She told me that she had never been to the synagogue before. Like me, she was looking for company, not for God. She had long legs, lustrous black hair, full and lovely lips and those willingly amused dark eyes. We left rehearsals together.

Because I was playing the part of Simon Bliss in
Hay Fever
and because I did not like being called Freddie, Betty continued to call me Simon offstage.
When I told her that I meant to be a novelist, she asked to see something I had written. It did not occur to me to wonder whether she had a boyfriend. She did: a Welshman who later became a well-known newsreader on ITV. In my vanity and proximity, I never considered him a rival. I asked Betty whether everyone she knew called her Betty, even though her first name was Sylvia. On the whole, yes, they did; but her dentist brother-in-law Arthur did have a nickname for her. I promised not to use it if she would tell me what it was. All right, it was ‘Beetle’; because she had that glistening black hair. I have rarely called her anything else; never Betty, though sometimes ‘Bett’.

When I brought her my brown spiral notebook, she read a page, turned to the next, and read on. After a while she looked at me in a way that made me want to kiss her. She made no objection. She was at least three years older than I was and she had artistic friends in Tite Street, Chelsea. Years later, she told me that what convinced her that I would be a writer was a talent for standing back from events and describing them with seemingly impersonal accuracy. I learned from Maugham what he had from the Goncourts.

One night, after rehearsal, we walked down Lisson Grove and turned into a dark alley where there was a row of garages behind a petrol station. We kissed and kissed, until we were breathless, against a brick wall. After a while, but not before she had said, ‘I love you, Simon,’ we heard the sirens of a police car in the distance. A few minutes later, a van turned, on shrill tyres, into the alley, its lights went dark, and it was driven into the petrol station’s big garage. The slatted door of the entrance slithered down like a portcullis.

A blaring police car flashed past, going on up Lisson Grove. We might have been in a gangster movie. We found a telephone booth around the corner. I dialled 999. The operator thanked me for my information and we went back to the alley to wait for further excitements. We waited and waited. Nothing happened. Could it be that there were crimes that the police elected not to solve? It was too late to resume our embraces that
night, but we soon did so elsewhere. I was learning at last, and fast, that it was possible to be happy.

Early in the New Year, my father’s connections in Fleet Street secured me an interview with the news editor of the
Sunday Express
, the bestselling popular Sunday newspaper that was not the
News of the World
. Close behind it in sales were
The People
and the
Sunday Despatch
, which was serialising
Forever Amber
. Kathleen Winsor’s novel featured an off-the-shoulder restoration heroine not unlike Moll Flanders, though never so explicitly gamey.

John Gordon, the editor of the
Sunday Express
, responded with columns in which he deplored cleavage and similar threats to what had made Britain great. His pomposity provoked Graham Greene and his film producer, socialite friend John Sutro to announce the foundation of the John Gordon Society, an organisation devoted to endorsing the editor’s moral code. They would be no more than vice-presidents. The presidential chair, with a pin under its cushion, was reserved for Mr Gordon. The editor boxed clever enough to take their irony straight; he took their garland of nettles as if it smelt of roses. John Sutro was a friend not only of Graham Greene but also of Somerset Maugham. When, many years later, I wrote a biographical sketch of Willie, Sutro sent me a handwritten letter of congratulation, which was folded in a sumptuous envelope with an inner lining of purple tissue paper. Graham Greene might have been a suitable chairman for the ‘Some of my Best Friends Society’; his comity with Sutro did not inhibit him from portraying Jews, in his pre-war novels, with saleable malice.

The offices of Beaverbrook Newspapers were encased in a curvaceous modern black glass building. Its opaque ground-floor windows reflected a pub called the Hole in the Wall on the far side of Fleet Street. The
Sunday Express
news editor, Stanley Head, was an indoor man. Sallow and slumped in his tipped-back chair, unbrushed ash on the bulge of his misbuttoned cardigan, he had seen it all and liked little of it. The last thing he needed under his weary wing was a green apprentice who had not even worked on
a local paper. However, my father’s frequent lunchtime guest Alan Brockbank, the paper’s diplomatic, political, naval and industrial correspondent, had undertaken to supervise my novitiate, should I be admitted to the newsroom. Stanley Head proposed, with a sigh, that I go and find a news story and write some copy. He would then see what he could do, or not.

Having spent a decade mimicking the orotund Cicero and the tersely sarcastic Tacitus, how could it be beyond my powers to compose winning paragraphs of penny-a-lining journalese? A composition was a composition. I had done hundreds of them in Latin, Greek and English, verse and prose: show me the metre and I would finish the job. Having written my audition piece in what I took to be a suitably low style, I thought it wise to show it to Guy Ramsey, in case he had any suggestions. He did. The first was that I should tear it up and start again. He then spelt out the simple rules for any composition that stood a chance of passing muster in the Beaverbrook press. Ideally, no story should be longer than three paragraphs, no paragraph longer than three sentences, and no sentence much longer than three words. As in Henry Luce’s
Time
magazine, the Beaver’s model for all seasons, a news story had to be front-loaded, the reader incited to read on by the urgency of the opening phrase. My draft disqualified itself on inspection: it contained several semi-colons and a few words of three syllables. With sub-editorial dexterity, Guy abbreviated my verbosity in line with Beaverbrook practice. Stripped of adjectives, adverbs or florid punctuation, the story became lean, vivid and presentable.

I took it into Stanley Head’s office and put it on his desk, as if it were all my own work (the title attached to Leslie Grimes’s daily cartoon in the
Evening Star
). He sighed and pulled the piece towards him. I stood there as he glanced through it. He sighed again, looked up, brushed ash from his sad knitwear, and said, ‘If Brocky agrees, you can come in Tuesday. I can’t pay you anything but expenses, if you’re ever authorised to have any. Not bad for a beginner, this, not bad at all.’

Reporters in the 1950s lacked mechanical means to record what was said in an interview. The only way to validate a quotation was to produce shorthand notes. Before turning up for work in Fleet Street, I enrolled for evening classes at the Pitman Shorthand school in Wimbledon. The well-attended college was in a red-brick Victorian Gothic building in unsmart lower Wimbledon. Our grey teacher was a dedicated Pitman pietist. Having taught the Method for many years, she still gloried in the codified deftness with which whole syllables could be collapsed into a single stroke, light or heavy, up above or below or along the line on the page. She talked, with apostolic zeal, of the beautiful symbols and inescapable speeds that a true initiate could achieve. No accelerating speaker could ever get away from a fully armed, 200-words-a-minute Pitman graduate.

We sat at scholarly desks in a classroom. The hieroglyphs were chalked, in all their loopy elegance, on a wide blackboard. The quick clatter of trainee typists came from an adjacent room. I should have been wise to acquire their skill, but the girls (90 per cent of the tiros were female) sounded dauntingly fast as they translated the teacher’s dictation onto keyboards masked, by a wooden panel, from visual inspection. The school brochure promised that a Pitman secretary could produce a page of flawless text in pitch darkness. I have never taught myself to type with more than three or four fingers; two usually suffice. Nor did I assimilate a full range of calligraphic elegance from the shorthand course. However, I did leave with enough of the curves and straights of the now archaic notation to be equipped to play the part of the Beaver’s Johnny-on-the-spot.

Alan ‘Brocky’ Brockbank was a tall, sandy-haired balding man in his early fifties. In the war he had worked his way up from the lower deck to become a lieutenant-commander in the ‘wavy navy’ (the RNVR). With his notepad braced open at the due page by two rubber bands, he transcribed and composed his copy at speed, in 2B pencil, onto sheets of foolscap, no more than nine lines on a page, four or five words on a line. The corrected
version was hammered out, double-spaced, on a heavy Royal Sovereign. A copy-boy then passed it to Bernard Drew, the garter-sleeved chief sub. He sat, scissor-fingered, at a long table in the middle of the wide, low-ceilinged newsroom.

The one thing reporters dreaded was that Bernard should scan their copy, look at the low, green ceiling, and then impale it on one of the two spikes in the centre of the table. If the piece survived to be allotted to a sub, his business was to eliminate symptoms of individual style. Even if its author merited a byline, as Brocky sometimes did, every text had to be trimmed in the house style so that it spoke in the accents only of the paper and of its proprietor.

The subs were the Beaver’s military police. Guy Ramsey told me how Randolph Churchill, who wrote a column for the
Evening Standard
, had come into the office one day, loaded with a liquid lunch at White’s, and abused one of the secretaries for making a mess of his copy. When she was reduced to tears, one of the subs turned to Randolph and said, in his oikish treble, ‘Know your trouble, Churchill? Your name begins with C, H in
Who’s Who
and S, H in what’s what.’

The core staff of the
Sunday Express
was composed of men (there were no females in the newsroom) of a kind I had never met before. In 1950, popular journalism was an activity for artisans, rarely for graduates, never for first-class minds. Brocky and Bernard Harris, the sandy, blue-eyed, pipe-smoking chief feature writer, supplied most of the copy that bulked out the dummy edition of the paper, which grew fatter as the week progressed. Many-hatted in his roles as diplomatic correspondent, industrial correspondent, naval correspondent or
Sunday Express
reporters (the plural suggested that the Beaver had unlimited, ubiquitous resources), Brocky rarely stayed long in the office. He had no use for cyclostyled hand-outs from ministries or advertisers.

We were regularly on our way by taxi to confront politicians or
businessmen. While other journalists waited in the proper place for the man of the moment, Brocky found his way to the back door and whoever might be coming out of it. Few escaped his mild, prehensile greeting, ‘Oh, Sir Bernard … Alan Brockbank,
Sunday Express
…’ The Sir Bernard most regularly in the news in the 1950s was Sir Bernard Docker, the chairman of both BSA and Daimler motors. He and his ex-showgirl wife Norah were notorious, but not wholly unpopular, for flaunting their wealth in a time of austerity. Their Daimler was covered with gold stars and was said to have gold bumpers. The couple’s flagrant ability to gild lilies was at once scandalous and entertaining. While his lady revelled in her notoriety, Sir Bernard was never seen to smile.

Persistent but never nasty, Brocky was adept at accompanying whatever absconding mogul it might be to his waiting black Humber or Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire (the cad’s Rolls-Royce, deemed luxurious on account of its ‘fluid flywheel’, whatever that was). Brocky could hold open a car door, with implacable courtesy, in such a way that his victim could not contrive to get inside before he had answered just a couple of questions. He always had a small point he wanted to clarify and, oh, one very last thing he wanted to be sure he had got right. After the publication of an annual report with one or two things in it that Brocky didn’t quite follow, we surprised Billy Butlin, the holiday camp king, at the back exit from one of the Nissen huts that augmented the BEA terminal at Heathrow. In the face of my master’s gentle inquisition, little Billy spilled enough beans to furnish us with an exclusive.

We had liquid sessions in a pub near Transport House with Herbert Morrison, another little man, at once cocky and shifty, his glass eye less elusive than the good one. What I heard from his lips was enough to rend from end to end my naïve notions of socialist solidarity, but memory’s sieve has not retained exactly what he said about Stafford Cripps or ‘Nye’ or the recently retired Ernie Bevin, whose post as Foreign Secretary Morrison occupied long enough only to establish his incompetence to hold it.
Bevin’s reputation has been glorified by his civil service mandarins. The lecherous Ernie’s working-class anti-Semitism was an easy fit with that of The Office’s ‘camel corps’ of Arabists. The dockers’ leader took easily to
ex officio
presumption: Lady Diana Cooper reported, without surprise or outrage, how Bevin had pressed fat kisses on her at an embasssy reception in Paris. Morrison’s great achievement was domestic: he was the prime mover of the Festival of Britain. He urged us to go and have a look at what was happening on the South Bank.