Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (25 page)

Max, Oliver, and Peter shared a study, but because I was a year behind them I had to linger in the house room, keep my books in a locker, and do all my work at one of the long tables with roughly twenty-five other boys my age or younger. I often found myself knocking on their door, asking if I could have a coffee and work on a tune with them. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I was welcome. Sometimes I wasn’t sure who my friends were back in the house room. Sometimes I just felt like saying, to no one in particular, “I have to get out of this fucking place,” because anger and frustration at being somewhere I resented being had replaced the achievement highs and happiness of St Aubyns. I felt I had no control over or say as to what happened in my life. Even if I had felt able to speak my feelings to anyone, the nature of those feelings—
I should have gone to Eton with my friends from St Aubyns
.…
I’m above the rest, the castle way makes it clear
—would have left me more isolated than ever.

*   *   *

Granny B was having the very devil of a time in Nassau maintaining the level of privacy she had sought throughout her life. Since the early 1960s “unsavoury characters” (many of them friends and associates of Sam Clapp) had been doing their level best to “take things over” (both phrases attributable to my mother’s fine sense of humour and astute assessment of the situation). Every multimillionaire “developer” known to mankind had been showing up with a burning desire to destroy the natural beauty of Paradise Island and transform every square inch they could lay their hands on into a resort hotel and casino. In brief, gangsters and their cohorts were moving in, and something had to be done.

Granny was briefly, but not for long, able to beat gangland to the punch by purchasing first the Porcupine Club, which had had the dark cloud of a foreign conglomerate with high-rise projections hovering ominously over it, and then Grayleath, the stupendous eleven-acre property adjacent to her beloved Harbourside and one of the many former homes of her South of France friend the wealthy Canadian Dorothy Killam, a house that could have become the target of the very worst of the worst.

Granny gave Grayleath, which had a sensational garden and an Olympic-size swimming pool, to my mother and Auntie Pops, which was very kind of her although it was never at all clear to me what opportunities might present themselves for the family to gather under this far-off, exotic roof. To the Porcupine Club and its members, a mildly run-down home away from home “estate” for semicolonial types who liked to play a little tennis and drink a lot of gin on the wide, rickety veranda, she gave carte blanche to carry on just as before.

She personally breathed a long and heavy sigh of relief at not having to contend with the grim possibility of being spied upon in her private domain from a nearby eleventh-floor suite. For the umpteenth time I marvelled at how simple it all seemed for the castle way’s operating system to keep the world, and all its associated complications, at bay.

Holidays accentuated the Stowe-versus-home-front comparisons, and none more so than the Easter 1967 visit to Paradise Island. Grayleath was a sumptuous addition to the “empire.” Over the period of a year it had been redecorated, air-conditioning installed, and the garden pruned and trimmed with the precision of a Curzon Street barber. So when we all turned up in April, everything looked miraculous, and I, aged fifteen, proceeded to drink copiously from the luxury brew.

Unlike Granny’s Harbourside, our house was on the north side of the island, close to the beach, so we had an Austin minivan at the dock to drive guests and luggage the quarter mile up through the garden. This was quite nice because, no matter how much water it received, the grass was always bordering bed-of-nails-like to walk on, especially after a few hours of hot sun had dried it out.

Eleven acres on Paradise Island was a considerable amount of territory, and the garden was awash in palm trees, cork trees, shrubs, climbers, and flower beds dotted in all the right places with oleander, hibiscus, porterweed, dogwood, and yellow elder. The whole thing was a picturesque riot of Bahamian tropical splendour, and it reminded me, in a peculiar way, of Granny B’s wood garden at Leeds with its winding grassy paths and lush weeping willows. Both gardens were uniquely beautiful and tranquil and were in perfect harmony with the dwellings which abutted them and breathed their air.

Grayleath was almost U-shaped, built of wood, and painted soft white. The gently slanting grey slate roof, brushed by tall palms, gave the spacious single-storey house a charming and unpretentious appearance. All the rooms were airy, the furniture colourful, the bedrooms had pretty wood panelling, and the card room/music room/second drawing room was a festival of green and white from the sofas, armchairs, and plushest of carpets to the cascade of greenery seen through wide windows, whose shutters were kept open by day. The walls of the long corridor off which all the bedrooms led were trompe l’oeil paintings of Bahamian landscapes, and the veranda overlooking the pool was tiled in black and white, windowed, and casually furnished with wicker chairs and an abundance of plant life. One could be swimming in the transparent turquoise sea, trot up the soft white sand private beach (hosing down one’s feet at the tap by the steps on the way), and be by the freshwater pool in less than three minutes.

For part of our stay David’s friend William (son of my godmother Lady Buckhurst) and my friend Camilla (daughter of my godfather G) beefed up the family complement of our parents, David, James, Vanessa, Nanny, and me. James was disinclined to reveal his reason for not bringing a friend, male or female, but I suspected it had something to do with his not wishing to mix what he saw as the incompatibility of his “hip” new circle of friends with the eccentricities of our family.

All went well for ten days. We were handsomely looked after by Clive, our charming black butler, and a bevy of housemaids who wore pretty blue-and-white-striped dresses and pressed white aprons. We swam, we sunbathed, we ate, we drank; friends of our parents came over from the mainland for lunches, bringing their teenage daughters, all of whom spent their entire time chatting up and making eyes at James, who successfully raised their temperatures by addressing them with winning indifference.

We visited Huntington Hartford at his Ocean Club, which he was enthusiastically transforming into a hotel enterprise of elaborate luxury, topped off by his purchase of the Cloisters, a fourteenth-century French Augustinian monastery, from William Randolph Hearst, which was reassembled on the thirty-acre property to startling effect. Mr. Hartford was kind enough, on one occasion, to show us at some length his skill in interpreting our individual personalities with a set of tarot cards. The laboriousness of this display and its ludicrous conclusions rendered that afternoon’s digression a wearisome affair and made me wonder if Hunt was quite all there.

*   *   *

After two weeks James was getting bored and asked David and me if we’d fancy renting a speedboat for a day. I was full of enthusiasm for the plan, David less so. He urged caution, primarily out of concern for our lack of boating experience, not to mention the expense. James informed us that he’d had plenty of experience in handling small boats (something I was unaware of but only too happy to go along with) and that he believed he had sufficient funds for the rental.

Quite how James knew where to go and what to do was left unsaid, but without David and without informing our parents, he and I set off one morning walking through the Porcupine Club and over to the Paradise Island hotel property, where boat rentals were available at the small marina nearby. My brother signed papers—insurance, no doubt, and other noteworthy legal matters—handed over a large amount of cash, left his British driver’s licence with the man in charge, and in we climbed to a heavy-looking, seen-better-days black wooden speedboat with an enormous outboard motor. Much to my relief, James reversed away from the dock with consummate skill, easing the boat gently into the harbour. He then put it into forward, and we set off on our journey around the island, passing under the new bridge which had caused Granny, and other island property owners, so much concern over the inevitable crowds to come.

Although the boat felt like an old tub, and each bump on the water resonated like an elephant stomping its foot, the ensuing half hour was exhilarating and almost as charged as a day out with the Galway Blazers. We left the eastern end of Paradise Island behind and headed out to sea before turning in a wide arc and making a run for the north shore.

“How on earth do you know how to do all this?” I shouted at my brother as he let me take the wheel once we were clear of any other boats or obstacles. “I have friends with boats,” he told me. “I’ve learned a lot with them and done tons of driving.”

The sight of our beach from far out at sea, and the ragged line of palm trees swaying in the breeze as we approached, was magnificent. “So what’s the plan?” I asked.

“We’ll gently make our way past the reef up ahead, a couple of hundred yards off the beach, then, when we’re close enough, let’s drop anchor and have a swim. How about that?”

“Okay. I have a feeling Ma and Pa are going to be pretty angry because we didn’t tell them what we were doing.”

“I’m old enough to make decisions for myself. Don’t worry. It’ll all be fine.” We approached the beach as slowly as possible, but the current was clearly taking us there faster than we would wish. On top of that, James suddenly shouted, “Shit! I can’t tell how deep it is. We must be too far out to drop anchor now, but if we wait too long we’re going to end up on the beach.”

“Oh dear,” I said helpfully.

“Dear-oh-fucking-dear is right!”

We were fifty yards away from the shore, and I could clearly see the steps and parts of the house through the palm trees when James told me to drop the anchor. Though it was incredibly heavy, I managed to pick up the iron monster from the bow and toss it over the side. It seemed to hit sand before running out of rope, but did nothing to stop our forward momentum. The waves were small but insistent. James put our vessel in reverse, but that had the effect of turning it around and little else, so now we were heading for the beach, backwards. Realizing that he must save the outboard motor if he could, my brother put the boat in neutral, and we both did our best to manipulate the anchor in such a way that it would get a grip on the bottom. To no avail.

Gently the bow touched sand, we rocked a little, then the stern swung round, becoming parallel with the beach. We were only a few feet from the shore, the propeller firmly wedged. Our boat was going nowhere, and James and I were
dans la merde
.

At lunch our father played the role of the hanging judge as only he knew how, silently deliberating as to whether the gallows fitted the crime, while Ma, David, Nanny, and Vanessa made valiant efforts not to give off the unseemly air of onlookers at a public execution.

James and I sat side by side and stared sullenly at our plates. Only Ma made halfhearted attempts at polite conversation, but there was not a great deal, apparently, to talk about. Not until the end of the meal did my father commence his summation, and it was a real corker, laced with vitriol and withering condemnation. The tone of delivery was measured and calm, but, like his mother, Pa had always been able to be devastatingly forceful without raising his voice. My insides turned to jelly, and I imagined my face turning puce. Stealing a glance at James, whose Ray-Ban sunglasses provided him with a smattering of cover, I noticed that he, too, uncharacteristically, found himself floundering in the eye of the storm. The nursery incident, when I was still in my high chair, returned from out of the blue to dislocate my thoughts, and I wondered if my brother was having unpleasant recollections of that same morning.

Before lunch and before our dressing-down, James and I had been instructed to contact the marina and do what had to be done. Sixty minutes after the accident our boat had been towed off the sand by a brace of highly amused Bahamians whom I later wished had joined us for lunch and explained to our father the more jocular side of the story. Our parents wrote a cheque for the damage; the amount was never revealed, and the incident was never spoken of again. If James was punished in some way I never found out how. I had my next month’s pocket money withdrawn. This came as a severe blow because the group needed more equipment, and I was obliged to pay my share.

*   *   *

Castle way programming never let up and sometimes produced a surprise. Three months later I was issued a free pass (“Of course you can go”) and tourist-class ticket to fly to still–Communist Yugoslavia for a summer holiday with Max. It never once crossed my mind that my trip to Eastern Europe and my parents’ to the South of France to join Granny B for the same two weeks was anything more than coincidence.

Images of dark, empty streets, floodlit by night, spooky Communist spies playing deadly cat-and-mouse with dour Western counterparts—lifted, naturally, from the best espionage films of the day like
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
and
Funeral in Berlin
—filled my head during the flight.

Zagreb turned out to look as grimy, run-down, and depressing as any of the Russian towns I had seen in films, newsreels, or photographs. Whatever grandeur my hotel once possessed had disappeared. The giant foyer gave the impression of having been ravaged by an occupying force, its columns peeling, its scattered furniture decrepit and sad. My room was large; an exposed lightbulb dangled from the high ceiling, and the bed’s ancient springs made their presence felt. From my window I looked down on streetlights, tramlines, stationary trams, and lumbering streetcleaning trucks whose hoses and giant brushes were the only soundtrack to the night’s desolation. I actually found myself wondering if my telephone was bugged or a secret camera was watching my every move. Maiden’s Tower comforts seemed far away but the spirit of adventure was intoxicating.

In the morning I paid my bill in cash and, lugging my small suitcase, set off for the station, which Max had told me was five minutes’ walk from the hotel. I had not gone more than a hundred yards when suddenly I heard a loud yell from behind that made me jump. I turned to see a soldier, carrying a rifle, running directly towards me, his greatcoat flapping around him like a doomsayer’s robe, waving, pointing, manifestly indicating that I should halt. Immediately I pictured sinister men in black leather jackets, interrogation cells, and demands for an admission of guilt. Then, before panicking completely, I racked my brain for clues as to what I could possibly have done wrong.