Slowing Down (22 page)

He lived for a long time in Tim Whidbourne’s large house, then ‘the wrong end’ of Cheyne Walk, where Victoria and I shared a basement flat with Andy Garnett, and David came down very strictly to get the rent, part of the gas bill etc.

A jazz lover when I first met him, he moved into the early rock world for the excitement and mingled a lot with Mick Jagger in particular. Indeed he was a consultant on the film
Performance
(for his knowledge of the criminal
and
the contemporary and outrageous music world) but even then he loved the old twenties blues and jazz singer Ma Rainey, preferring her comparatively primitive performances to Bessie Smith’s, her protégée, or anyone else.

Andy and I were once driving to a mill belonging to his formidable mother (who was mercifully absent) to fulfil some service and we took David with us. Andy was at that point fascinated not only by the Chelsea set but also by villains. David was essentially a city ne’er-do-well and was amazed when we finished up in, I think, Berkshire. ‘This
grass,’ he said with stupefied amazement, ‘it must be worth something!’ His knowledge of nature was non-existent. He called all birds, including sparrows, ducks!

David was gay, in a non-camp way and, although technically rather ugly, his vitality and humour, his
boldness
, won him many rather good-looking partners. He was painted by Lucian Freud, a fine portrait which the artist entitled
The Procurer
. Lucian was, and still is, famous for suing people who assume things, whether true or not, but this time it was David who put the boot in. I don’t remember if he won or if it was settled out of court, but it was amazing he did it at all.

After many shared japes – David was absurdly inventive and the master of chutzpah – he vanished from sight. Then I heard he was living in Wales. Why? Were the mob after him? Nobody knows. Shortly afterwards he committed suicide. Again, a mystery; David Litvinoff, an enigma to the end.

Incidentally, it is always an all-male occasion, except the Christmas meeting, when you can bring a ‘lady guest’, as some of the more elderly members would probably describe a female partner. You can, however, if you warn the secretary in advance, bring a male friend (or partner!) any time.

That noise, like several kettles on the hob, is feminists’ blood boiling. I myself can think of lots of women who would enliven the ambience – Germaine Greer for one – but I don’t believe that most of the members’ wives or ‘partners’ would enjoy it much, especially as the conversation these days, when I can hear it, is, as per usual with elderly men, mostly pure reminiscence.

I must admit to enjoying these non-PC events. When I was young and thought very occasionally about old age
and death (after my grandfather had died in the thirties or my father in the sixties), I used to restore my optimistic equilibrium by reflecting that everyone in the world was for it, and not just golden lads and lasses, but
everybody!

Oh dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark…

The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters

The generous patrons of the arts, the statesmen and the

rulers

Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees

Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the

dark…

‘East Coker III’ – T. S. Eliot

And so we do, including all those who attend the Nicolson and Toynbee Lunch Club.

And who is and who isn’t dead, I mean here and now? Sometimes I meet people I thought were dead and they’re not. Sometimes I believe people are alive and find out they’re not; and, the worst, I imagine I see them in the street and it’s not them at all, it’s just a stranger who looks a bit like them, but only a bit.

There’s an old joke, and you can’t stop me if you’ve heard it, but feel free to groan if that’s the case. An old gentleman, on waking up, would read the obituary column in
The Times
. ‘And if I’m not in it,’ he’d explain to people, ‘I get up.’

The Ben Nicolson and Philip Toynbee Lunch was not always so named. When Ben asked me to join, it was simply called the Luncheon Club, but when Ben died it was renamed in his memory and later Philip Toynbee joined him. No need in either of these cases to read the obituary
column. If your name is part of the Luncheon Club’s full title, it would seem you’ve left the building.

In fact I didn’t know Philip all that well and don’t think he was ever present at a lunch I went to, and yet I feel that if he had been there I’d have registered the fact. He was not someone whose presence anywhere you’d forget.

A knowledgeable Bohemian whose father was Arnold Toynbee, the distinguished historian, Philip had become a presence at both posh and louche parties. He was well known at the fashionable Gargoyle club, swaying across the floor under the original Matisse paintings, but he wasn’t only quite pissed, he was also extremely promiscuous. If he was at a party and hadn’t scored he would, his first wife, Ann, said, walk pathetically round the room asking any young woman not obviously bespoke, ‘Will you sleep with me? Will you sleep with me?’

Ann died recently of cancer in great pain but, typically, for she was a remarkable woman, without fuss. I doubt her marriage to Philip was happy, but she was very funny about him after he’d gone. He was very keen on fly-fishing, a brownie point as far as I’m concerned. One day a gust of wind planted his fly in his lower lip. As the fly was barbed and to remove it would mean leaving the water to visit the nearest hospital, he refused to go then, or indeed attend one for several days, and walked around with it stuck there. Ann said it looked truly repellent and that he quite enjoyed the disgust it provoked.

He had two children with Ann, both girls. The elder was called Josephine, ginger-haired and socially rather gauche. She adored Philip. When she in turn was dying, she became, almost overnight, gentle and lovable.

She’d had a child, a beautiful little boy called Pip, whose father was Mexican. Ann adored Pip. When he went to stay with her in her holiday cottage in the west of Ireland, the walls had become brown with peat smoke and Pip thought it was chocolate and tried to lick it off. He must be quite grown-up by now, but I have heard nothing of him lately.

The younger daughter was Polly. Unlike her older sister, she was only a toddler when Ann and Philip broke up. She has therefore no strong feelings about him, whereas Josephine worshipped him. Polly is now an oft-quoted political journalist on the
Guardian
and is frequently on TV panels vigorously defending positive liberalism (small ‘l’), but in the days when we still had the Tower near Brecon, she was living just up the road with the ever-smiling documentary TV writer Jeremy Sandford in a pretty but near-slum period farmhouse. His most celebrated play was the influential
Cathy Come Home
, a devastating attack on heartless officialdom, and the walls in their house were collaged with favourable newspaper cuttings.

Polly’s father, Philip, was there with a couple of friends the day Polly asked us to lunch. It was held in the large yard in front of the house. The yard itself was reasonably clean in comparison, as Jeremy bred horses.

It turned out to be a magical afternoon. There was a white mist on the hills, but it was warm and you could tell the sun would eventually lift it. Before this happened several of his beautiful equine creatures materialized like phantoms, clip-clopped across the yard and vanished again through another open gate on to the still invisible hill.

Philip was in sparkling form. We talked about fishing for a while, but then he told me he was thinking of giving it up
in favour of sailing. He said, ‘Every decade one should change one’s hobby.’ I didn’t agree at all with this sub-Cyril Connolly-like aphorism, but I let it go. I only hoped he didn’t end up getting a sheet anchor hooked in his lip.

There was only one unfortunate incident in this golden day, and it demonstrated what I’d always heard, that Philip tended to be totally self-centred like a clever toddler. Polly, knowing perhaps from Ann that her father’s favourite food was brawn, had managed to get some. In Lancashire or Scotland there’d have been no difficulty, but in Wales over thirty years ago there was none, not even in the huge covered market which is a treasure-house of most fodder. Still, somehow she succeeded and put it in front of Philip in a bowl, expecting no doubt some positive response. Without breaking off his conversation with Jeremy he briefly told his daughter that he no longer enjoyed it. Naturally she was exasperated and upset. Luckily I had a passion for it, inherited from my father like so much else, and I asked if I could gobble it down. She probably thought I said this to save her feelings, but she was at least able to avoid a shout-up. There was also plenty to drink, which helped.

Philip was quite attractive in a rather odd way. He wrote good biographical books which the critics praised, but as they were in verse the public didn’t buy them and there are several still not published. He is missed by many people, all of whom fell under his spell. He died, not old, and now shares with Ben Nicolson the full name of the monthly lunch.

Of my three treats the
Oldie
lunches are perhaps, but only just, my favourite. They are held at regular intervals at

‘We talked about fishing… he told me, “Every decade one should change one’s hobby.” I didn’t agree at all’

Simpson’s in the Strand, a famous large old restaurant, unspoilt since the days when Edwardian city gents tucked their napkins over their often formidable stomachs.

It is renowned for its huge joints, carried by waiters on silver-plated dishes covered by hinged domes which they open to get at the splendidly rare meat. The vegetables, on the other hand, roast potatoes apart, are usually dismissed as overcooked, but not by me – I’m no lover of
al dente
.

The lunches are served at long tables and there is a chart outside showing where you’ll sit. Against the wall, on a low stage, is the top table and there, with whomever else he decides to sit, is the head Oldie himself, Richard Ingrams.

Ingrams was the founder with several school chums and others of
Private Eye
, in some ways admirable, in others an odious magazine. Grubby-looking but strangely endearing in private, he was the Torquemada, the scourge of Britain, especially in the ‘Swinging Sixties’.

He was much admired for printing stories most journalists knew were true but didn’t dare touch for fear of legal reprisal.
Private Eye
didn’t hesitate to blow it and indeed was frequently sued, most famously by Sir James Goldsmith, the magazine’s ‘Golden Balls’, who won enormous damages. The amount would have bankrupted most journals, but
Private Eye
typically started the ‘Golden Balls’ fund and enough readers who disliked and mistrusted Sir James, knighted by Harold Wilson in his dubious and mysterious final ‘Violet’ Honours list, raised enough for the magazine to remain afloat.

Someone who attended part of the trial said that during it ‘Jimmy and Ingrams seemed to fall in love with each other’. If they did, it was probably because they were both
pirates – very different pirates, but pirates nevertheless. Sir James (like Captain Hook, an old Etonian) was a swashbuckler, a high-stakes gambler, an enthusiasticadulterer. Ingrams, on the contrary, was a puritan, very funny perhaps, but determined to fight the good fight. Both Richard and Jimmy (whom I did meet several times, always feeling like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a Rolls) had powerful charisma.

Those who mistrusted and disliked the
Eye
accused it with some justification of being anti-gay, anti-Semitic and anti-sexual. It was at times all three, but some people made too much of it.

Among other strips it ran one drawn by the ever-inventive Heath and called ‘the Sads’ (
Private Eye
-speak for gays). One I specially remember showed two shaven-headed, black-leathered, moustached butch frequenters of Old Compton Street. An old-fashioned, wasp-waisted and discreetly made-up old queen minces up to the lads in the pub to tell them how fortunate they are. ‘In my day,’ he lisped, ‘you were constantly threatened by the law, open to blackmail, beaten-up and insulted…’ In the final frame, one butch sad turns to the other and says, ‘Lucky old sod!’ Today, in fact, although the police seem to have cooled it, there’s still plenty of ‘queer bashing’ and open insults, and I loathe all that, but then I was gay until I was about thirty.

Anti-Semitism?
Private Eye
? Well, I suppose if you’re really PC, Jewish jokes are anti-Semitic, but not to Jews, or at least not to most Jews. My mother, who was Jewish (which means that by Jewish law I am too), loved Jewish jokes, and if I heard a new one I’d ring her to tell her. So when
Private Eye
renamed Weidenfeld & Nicolson ‘Snipcock and Tweed’, I thought that was both clever
and
funny.

In other respects, however,
Private Eye
was very suspect. From the indiscretions let drop at the famous lunches at the Coach and Horses in Soho, and especially those revealed (‘shtrictly between ush) by stupid politicians plied with drink, they gleaned rich pickings, while Nigel Dempster, a famous and much-feared gossip columnist, let them have endless stories he couldn’t have used in the
Daily Mail
.