Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (2 page)

Since Comyn-Platt had been writing such loving letters to Etta ever since 1904, it seems quite possible that he may have been Grizel’s and David’s real father. They both suspected that their father was not their father and it was common in Edwardian times for wealthy upper-class women to have lovers and illicit children, and judging by the only photograph of Comyn-Platt that has survived, which shows that he was not ugly at all, he and Niv shared a startling resemblance. The photo is a head-and-shoulders shot that appeared on Comyn-Platt’s election leaflet when he stood for Parliament for Southport in the general election of December 1923, when he was fifty-four, and at the same age Niv looked remarkably like him. They had the same slightly bulbous chin, sensitive mouth, long straight nose and sloping forehead, and both began to go bald early. They also shared a remarkable facility for reinventing the truth. In
Who’s Who
Comyn-Platt claimed that he was born in 1875 whereas he was in fact born in 1869, and he lopped ten years off his age when listing each of his diplomatic posts. He even claimed that during the war he was invalided out in 1916 whereas it happened in January 1915, just five months after the war started, which raises a doubt as to whether he ever really was a railway officer and interpreter in France. Carelessly he told
Who’s Who
not only that he had been born in 1875 but also that he had stood for Parliament in 1891, when he would have been just sixteen and too young to vote, but nobody noticed, and when he died in 1961
The Times
and the
Daily Telegraph
both said he was eighty-five when in fact he was ninety-two.

Like Niv, Platt was an excellent raconteur and his book is extremely vivid and well written:

In another letter he wrote:

Like Niv, Comyn-Platt wrote about the famous people he had met – Lord Kitchener, Winston Churchill’s mother, the opera singer Dame Nellie Melba – but he was not always as kind about his acquaintances as Niv was. Cecil Rhodes, for instance, was ‘the essence of dullness’. Like Niv, too, some of Platt’s stories seem wildly larger than life. When he trekked from Mombasa on the Indian Ocean into the heart of Uganda in 1898 to serve at the British high commission in Entebbe he said that he walked for a nightmarish three months almost all the way to Lake Victoria, at an average of fifteen miles a day, menaced all the way by lions, jiggers and malaria with a hundred porters carrying his goods, chattels and food on their heads, and a mule that he dressed in a canvas coat and trousers to protect it from ‘the deadly bite of some vile fly’. And when he arrived he then spent months in a mud hut with a grass roof and two holes for windows. One evening, he said, he looked through one of the holes and saw a crocodile seize a young girl on the edge of the lake, and although she screamed and he ran 300 yards to her rescue he was too late and the girl disappeared shrieking beneath the water.

If Comyn-Platt was indeed Niv’s and Grizel’s real father it is a tragic story, for their relationship was dreadful. He seems to have had little time for children and Grizel told me with passion: ‘Oh, we all
hated
him. I can’t imagine why my mother liked him. He was tall and ugly and didn’t like us and he tried to be bossy. He denigrated us all the time. The first time I was given a knife to use instead of a spoon he said “how stupid the girl looks”. We couldn’t stand him.’

Yet Comyn-Platt had some admirable qualities. He was surprisingly independent and unconventional for a diplomat, and wrote in one of his letters: ‘I really believe that if the Chancelleries of Europe were to close down for six months
in the year half the World’s troubles would be avoided.’ He was amusing: ‘Have you ever thought what punishment is likely to be meted out to snobs in the next world? I have. I am quite convinced that they will be compelled to sit for all eternity in a back row, wearing red hot coronets.’ He was intelligent, well read, and imaginative: in the middle of a forest he once saw a magical, beautiful, ‘luminous’ bird and thought it was his beloved Etta in disguise, and he was convinced that he saw her face in the wisps of smoke drifting from an old man’s pipe. And in one letter he wrote:

Platt was brave and adventurous: riding on horseback through the desert with two Arabs, he had to separate them when they started to fight. He foresaw the end of European power in the Middle East decades before it dwindled. He could be kind and generous: in Constantinople he met a poor girl who was trying to collect a thousand piastres so as to free her beloved fiancé from prison, where he was serving a sentence for smuggling, and ‘she was so brave and resigned about it all’, wrote Platt, ‘that my feelings got the better of me, and I gave her the rest of the money he needed. How grateful she was, and how she blessed me! I can see her now, her eyes full of tears, as she looked at the gold coins.’

There also seems no doubt that Platt loved Etta deeply. The last few letters in his book were written after they had married, when he went back to Constantinople, and he called her ‘dear Heart’ and ‘dearest’ and wrote: ‘have you realized that tomorrow week is the anniversary of our wedding day? I pray we may never spend another apart. Bless you.’ Later he wrote: ‘I shall always hate leaving you. And to think that we should not be together on the anniversary of our wedding day … the happiest day of our lives.’ Describing his journey through the Balkans, he added, ‘I would have given anything for you to have been with me … I think of you always, and shall be only really happy when I am with you again.’

Perhaps he was not at all the ogre that Niv said he was. Maybe the boy David hated him so much precisely
because
he made his mother so happy and resented him Oedipally for hijacking her love. Many years later Niv told his daughter Kristina that Comyn-Platt ‘beat him a lot’ when he was a boy, and in 1974 Niv told Bart Mills of the
Guardian
that he was always telling amusing stories and trying to make people laugh because ‘I want to be loved. It comes from being hit by my stepfather’, but Grizel told me that this was not true. On the other hand, Grizel and David were not alone in disliking Platt, who was to be knighted in 1922 in the New Year Honours list for his work as secretary to the British Commission in Uganda in 1898. The archaeologist and traveller Gertrude Bell met him in Baghdad in 1926 and advised her mother to avoid him in London because ‘he is such a bore’, and it is disconcerting that in
Who’s Who
he recorded under ‘Recreations’: ‘none’. Yet he was still sufficiently adventurous at the age of sixty-six, in 1936, to be described in
The Times
as ‘the noted traveller’ when he went off around the world – to Ceylon, Malaya, the West Indies and British Honduras – to estimate for the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire the danger of any rare species becoming extinct in those countries. In 1935 he published two more books,
The Turk in the Balkans
and
The Abyssinian Storm
, and in the
1940s and 1950s he wrote intelligent letters regularly to the
Daily Telegraph
– about income tax, politics, architecture, food rationing, nutrition, elocution, history – that were sometimes witty and always notable for their common sense.

In later life, certainly, Comyn-Platt became curmudgeonly and misanthropic, but many very old men do. In 1953 he joined the Turf Club, where a fellow member was Niv’s thirty-four-year-old brother-in-law, Andrew Rollo. ‘He was a bit forbidding,’ Rollo told me, ‘tall and thin with a grumpy face, like a Dickensian villain, and long grey hair and a large pair of spectacles. You’d cross the street to avoid him.’ But to be fair to Sir Thomas he was now eighty-four, a lonely widower and in pain. The Turf Club’s sixty-five-year-old head barman, Jimmy Holland, told me: ‘I got to know him well and when he was on form he was fun and he’d make jokes, and he had an account with a bookmaker and sometimes he’d put a fiver on a horse. But when he was on bad form that would last for six months. He could be miserable, a real Scrooge figure, about six foot two, with a bony face and moustache, but he was lonely and would come in every day at lunchtime and stay until about ten o’clock at night, even at weekends.’ He did, however, develop one unattractive habit. ‘He never went to the toilet,’ Holland told me. ‘The gents’ toilet was a long way downstairs in the basement, and we had open fires, and he used to pee in the fire, right in front of people. It would splash everywhere. He’d call the porter and say, “The fire’s gone out again,” and the porter would say, “You’ve pissed in the fire again, Sir Thomas.” ’

When Comyn-Platt died in 1961 his friend Henry Maxwell, in an affectionate tribute in
The Times
, admitted that he was gaunt, angular, old-fashioned and out of sympathy with the modern world, but what old man of ninety-two is not? ‘Below the austere and aloof exterior,’ wrote Maxwell, ‘was a warm humanity and a quickness of wit and humour which many a younger man might have envied. He pulled people’s legs, using his deafness on occasion [
and
] of his qualities the one
which I think was outstanding was his courage. Old age, infirmity when it came, enforced isolation, and physical suffering, he fought them step by step to the end.’

By the time Etta married Platt in 1917 Grizel and David, now nine and seven, had become very close. Their elder brother Max was fun, Grizel told me, but by now he was a naval cadet at Dartmouth and not often at home. Their elder sister Joyce was seventeen and living at home but ‘she was too bossy’, Grizel said, and ‘we didn’t like her and she didn’t like us’. But Grizel and David were always together, looked alike and shared a rebellious nature. Because she was so clumsy and always losing things Niv nicknamed her ‘Gump’ – the slang word then for a lunatic – and they went swimming, played cricket and fought together, and she admitted that sometimes he was unruly and uncontrollable. ‘We were such good friends,’ Grizel said. ‘David was great fun as a boy, always very naughty,’ which may explain why his mother and Comyn-Platt decided it was time to send him to a private boarding prep school in Worthing to learn a little discipline. Niv was appalled. ‘For years I was bitter about this miscarriage of justice and found it hard to forgive my stepfather and my mother for what they had done,’ he wrote in a ghosted series in the
Sunday Express
in 1958. He deeply resented being sent away from home, even though Grizel was at a boarding school in Norfolk. ‘It was a
foul
school,’ he told the British television chat-show host Michael Parkinson in 1981. ‘There was a dreadful amount of bullying of the smaller boys by the older boys and the masters. I remember being hung out of a window from the third floor, and the window was shut on the middle of my back, and two terrified children were holding my feet, and being beaten with a cane. Another charming fellow would beat your hand with a ruler. I’ve never been so frightened in my life as I was of those masters. And there was a mad matron. I went to her with a boil because the food was so bad and she said, “Oh, that’s nothing,” and lopped off the top of it with rusty scissors so I got a terrible
infection and was sent to hospital. Then my mother caught on.’

In
The Moon’s a Balloon
Niv described the teachers as ‘sadistic perverts who had been dredged up from the bottom of the educational barrel’ and claimed that he had been dangled by a teacher called Croome out of a fourth-floor window. Ten years later, when he was a strapping rugby-forward cadet at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, he went back to the school, determined to revenge himself on Croome, and discovered to his embarrassment that the school was deserted and the window was in fact close to the ground. And when
The Moon’s a Balloon
was published in 1971 the headmaster’s daughter protested publicly that her father had run an excellent school, and that he and his teachers had had a dreadful struggle to knock at least some sense and knowledge into young Niven’s thick and bolshie skull.

Whether David was justified in all his complaints or not, ‘I have very few pleasant memories,’ he wrote in the
Sunday Express
.