The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (27 page)

OBERT RETURNED FROM HIS Arabian expedition in early 1940 to find himself confronted with the prospect of having to enlist. Moving rapidly from the sublime to the mundane, he entered the Army as a private in May 1940. This was an unusual choice for someone of his background, but less surprising given his lack of enthusiasm for discipline; the fiasco of his officer-training days in 1931 probably returned to haunt him. Travelling to Brighton, he joined the Royal Sussex Regiment, where he was duly weighed, measured, inspected (‘Scar 3½ inches long oval upper patella, scar left groin’), questioned (‘Religious Denomination: C of E … Occupations: Independent’), and given a number (‘Private 6404613’).

Gerald was terribly worried when Robert enlisted. Even without the horrendous slaughter of trench warfare, casualties were inevitable and news of death and injury was already a dreadful part of daily life. In the event, the Mad Boy never left England and few in his regiment saw active service, but such an unchallenging war was far from guaranteed at this stage in the hostilities.

Just when Gerald might have taken another turn for the worse, he met a new young friend with whom he was so taken that some thought she might even replace the Mad Boy. Clarissa Churchill was poised, slim and feline, with sharp, almond eyes, and known to be very intelligent. And she was only nineteen. Winston Churchill’s niece, she had moved to Oxford at around the same time as Gerald. Billa thought her ‘terribly attractive, and gay, and young, and pretty. And I remember Gerald really rather liked her and we almost thought in a sort of dotty moment that he might marry her …’310 The new arrival was keen to do some studying and in the informal climate of the time, Roy Harrod quickly fixed Clarissa up with Freddie Ayer as a philosophy tutor. She could not have been less like the young female undergraduates Philip Larkin depicted in his novel Jill, ‘carrying bulky handbags and enormous tattered bundles of notes; they smelt inimitably of face powder and (vaguely) Irish stew’. Clarissa was sophisticated and worldly beyond her years and she soon found herself at the heart of Oxford society. She was a frequent visitor at the home of Lord David Cecil, an old friend of her mother’s, a fellow of New College and the younger son of the Marquess of Salisbury. Tall, lanky, clever and kind, he had a voice ‘like a crate of hens carried across a field’.311 David and his wife, Rachel, regularly gathered a stimulating group of people for dinners: Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra, the Harrods, and on their visits to Oxford, Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. In spite of rationing, they somehow managed to feed their guests; pudding was usually sorbet made from Ribena, available without coupons from the chemist.312 Although there is no evidence, it is highly likely that as a close friend of Billa’s, Jennifer found herself at some of these evenings, even if she was sometimes intimidated by high-powered intellectuals, who reminded her of her father’s disapproving attitudes.

In a corner of the Cecils’ drawing room, Clarissa noticed ‘there was often a small bald-headed man who rarely spoke and sat with bowed head. I eventually asked David who this character was and he said, “He’s called Lord Berners. He’s having a nervous breakdown.”’313 An unlikely pair, Gerald and Clarissa were soon intimates. She was attractive and opinionated; he was forlorn but full of surprises. ‘He never opened up,’ recalled Clarissa, ‘but I didn’t need that in a relationship. He was basically shy and his jokes were a defence against intimacy.’314 It wasn’t long before he had taken her by taxi to Faringdon and Clarissa was amazed at seeing the ‘ravishing’ eighteenth-century house. On another occasion, presumably when Robert was on leave, she noticed ‘a figure in private’s uniform’ walking about outside, ‘but never approaching us’. Asking Gerald who it was, he replied, ‘Oh, that’s my agent.’ Later, opening a drawer in the library, Clarissa came upon a pile of photographs, including famous characters such as Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, the Sitwells and William Walton. She would also have spotted ‘the agent’ in rather different circumstances. ‘I was completely astonished,’ she confessed. ‘I had no idea about Gerald’s past life.’315 It is strange that Gerald should have kept Robert from Clarissa, though it appears that Robert was suspicious and even jealous of Gerald’s relationship with the Prime Minister’s niece, so perhaps there was avoidance on his part, and Gerald was merely being discreet. (In a magazine interview, Gerald later listed his ‘favourite virtue’ as ‘tact’.)316 ‘Gerald never demonstrated affection,’ Clarissa recalled. ‘He was old-fashioned.’317 She believed that some of Gerald’s other friends were puzzled by the new addition to their ranks. On spotting her in the drawing room on another visit to Faringdon, Penelope Betjeman turned to Gerald and asked truculently, ‘Who’s that girl?’

‘WHO’S THAT GIRL?’ ASKED PENELOPE BETJEMAN OF CLARISSA CHURCHILL, HERE POSING UNDER GERALD’S INSTRUCTION AS A STATUE IN A NICHE

Gerald was still gloomy about the war, but from late 1940, he gradually emerged out of his depression and started having weekends back at Faringdon. He bought antiques from Mr John’s shop by All Souls in Oxford – Dresden vases with parrots and flowers, silver-gilt owls, cockerels and fish, that eventually decorated his home.318 David Cecil recalled them reading aloud to each other what they’d been writing and how Gerald was very much part of the ‘odd little enclave of society’ that had grown up in Oxford since the start of the war. Although Gerald was not a talker in the expansive intellectual tradition, he was appreciated by many of those who were, including the brilliant Isaiah Berlin.319

Clarissa returned to London in the spring of 1941 to work in the Foreign Office, but she remained Gerald’s favourite guest and there are numerous letters from the ageing man to the young woman, begging her to take the train from London to Faringdon again as soon as possible. ‘My dear Clarissa … It is heartbreaking to think of you in the catacombs of the Foreign Office with your debutantes and your lentils, blown along the corridors by the blast, together with Lady Colefax like people in Dante’s Inferno, instead of being here with us in the City of the Dreaming Dons.’

Gerald began coming back to life. In seventeenth-century Oxford, Robert Burton had recommended music as a treatment in his Anatomy of Melancholy and it was this beloved medium that accompanied Gerald’s return from the vortex of ‘black bile’ that had nearly drowned him. There was a piano in his rooms in St Giles’ and Gerald played for himself and the occasional visitor. His old friend Winnie, Princesse de Polignac (one of the many refugees from occupied Paris), passed through Oxford and together they went to Christ Church to hear Thomas Armstrong play the organ. Afterwards, Gerald persuaded Armstrong (later Sir Thomas, principal of the Royal Academy of Music) to give him music-theory lessons, in particular to learn the principles of the Renaissance composer Palestrina. Armstrong was impressed: ‘His was the most alert and far-seeing brain I’ve ever had to do with in music.’320

Despite his finesse in composition, it has been suggested that Gerald’s piano playing was not outstanding, if full of determination and spirit; ‘a cross between Mr Toad on a clear highway and Wanda Landowska [a famous harpsichordist] crashing a water-jump,’ suggested one critic.321 Gerald’s next composition was a two-piano polka for a 1941 Christmas pantomime (Cinderella, or There’s Many a Slipper, performed by the Tynchewycke Society to raise money for the Radcliffe Hospital), for which he also composed one of his best-loved comical songs, ‘Red Roses and Red Noses’.

In addition to composing, Gerald also found the energy to write no fewer than four novels, albeit slim ones. Count Omega is the fantastical story of a young composer (supposedly based partly on William Walton) who becomes obsessed with a youthful giantess, ‘whose virtuosity on a trombone seems to offer the perfect climax to a symphony he is composing’. Mr Pidger tells a darkly comic tale concerning inheritance and the bad behaviour of a spoilt lapdog. The Romance of a Nose is an extraordinary creation about Cleopatra having the world’s first nose job to correct her enormous protuberance. Like all his books, it combines a parodic lightness of touch with dark, sinister elements. Gerald’s research, even for a slight novel like this, was prodigious. His notebooks are filled with musings and precise historical references to ancient Egypt and Greece (‘Thebes, sweet-smelling, medicinal desert plants … geese caught by nets or shot with a bow’) and details about Hippocrates, Cicero, Asclepiades and Caesar. The title of his book was not immediately obvious and he tried out a list: ‘A Royal Nose, The Story of a Nose, The Queen’s Nose, A Nose is a Nose [presumably a playful nudge to his friend Gertrude Stein], The End of a Nose, Roman Nose.’ There are little sketches, quotes from Dante, thoughts on music and some botanical notes. Sometimes, there is a page given over to the first line of a story that didn’t get written: ‘Prawling was an old dog who lived in the country …’

His next book, Far From the Madding War, is dedicated to David and Rachel Cecil, who had cherished Gerald in his darkest times. The novel is based in Oxford during the war and has a good deal of autobiographical content, featuring Lord FitzCricket, Gerald’s alter ego. The heroine, Miss Emmeline Pocock, is widely believed to be based on Clarissa, though the ironic descriptions of her absurd choice of ‘war work’ are pure fantasy. The academic’s daughter decides to pick apart an immense and valuable German embroidery, with ample breaks for tea, lunch, rests and perusal of The Times. Various other friends make appearances throughout the pages: Harold Nicolson is teased (yet again), appearing as ‘Lollypop’ Jenkins, a politician who makes mock-heroic speeches and tries to maintain his reputation as an enfant terrible. There are also characters apparently based on Penelope Betjeman, Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin.

At last, Gerald was able to put his sadness and frustration into words. Expressing his loathing of war in a poem, ‘The Romantic Charter’, he describes his yearning for the sensuous and aesthetic pleasures that seem to have vanished. Some aspects of the poem might seem elitist, even snobbish, today; housemaids were now working in arms factories or driving ambulances and would never return to domestic service, and dinners ‘all in evening dress’ would dwindle along with Britain’s colonies. Some of Gerald’s rhymes edge towards doggerel, but he meant them. These were the things he loved and desperately missed, and the verses have a freshness and anger that are unlike the light ironies of some of his prose.

I am not fighting for the Poles or Czechs,

And only indirectly for the Rex.

I do not greatly love the Slav or Greek,

I cannot bear the way colonials speak.

I loathe efficiency and Nissen huts,

And as for ‘bonhomie’ I hate its guts.

I am not fighting Germans just to get

My democratic share of ‘blood and sweat’.

Dear Sir,

I feel that you may get the gist

Of all MY War Aims from the following list …

… Georgian houses, red repliquas of heaven,

Split pediments, breakfast at eleven,

Large white peonies in big glass bowls,

Asparagus au beurre, whitebait in shoals,

Close cropped grass, huge trees and cawing rooks,

A sunny breakfast room, a library with books,

Clean white housemaids in new print frocks,

Coachmen turned chauffeur, footmen on the box.

Dinner parties, all in evening dress,

Glamorous women drenched in Mary Chess

Charades and paper games, hothouses with the heat on,

Superficiality and Cecil Beaton.

Shrimps from Morecambe Bay, port that is tawny,

Claret and Beaujolais, soles that are Mornay,

Hot scones for tea, thick cream, the smell of logs,

Long country walks, thick shoes and spaniel dogs,

Ducks in the evening, swishing swans in flight,

Fires in bedrooms, flickering at night –

And of those autres fois, all those mœurs

Which are epitomized in ‘Valse des fleurs’ –

Fresh shiny chintzes, an herbaceous border –

Death and destruction to this damned new order.

It was around this time that Gerald took to wearing little knitted skullcaps that some compared to tea cosies, while others noted ‘a somewhat rabbinical design’. The knitter was Marie Beazley, wife of the noted archaeologist and expert on Greek vases, J. D. ‘Jack’ Beazley. Mrs Beazley was a mysterious woman with ‘iridescent blue hair … very black oblique eyes, a long Oriental nose and the curved lips of an Archaic goddess’.322 She was Jewish, wore overwhelming eastern perfumes, cooked unfamiliar Levantine dishes with rose petals and pistachios, and played Chopin on the piano with great feeling. Though Harold Acton adored her, Mrs Beazley was to some rather a figure of fun; such exoticism was a step too far for tweedy Oxford. There was talk of her décolleté, her formidable nose and even a little moustache, not to mention the tame goose that followed her around (and later died after eating the Daily Mail). Gerald appears to have enjoyed the Beazleys’ company enough to visit them regularly – he surely appreciated the Epicurean and musical elements, and Jack had a lingering nostalgia for the ideals of Grecian youth that had characterised his wilder young days.323 Certainly, Gerald was happy to wear the caps that warmed his bald pate and gave him an unusual aspect indoors. ‘It gives me an air of Ali Baba and startled my landlady the first time she saw me in it,’ he wrote with pleasure. The first one, in light green wool, was sent over when Gerald had ‘a sharp attack of flu’, but others followed in red and various colours and became quite a trademark over subsequent years.

It was through Marie Beazley that Gerald met Gregorio Prieto, a painter, sculptor and poet from Don Quixote’s region of La Mancha in south-central Spain. A friend of Garcia Lorca, the forty-four-year-old artist moved to London just before the war, and was introduced to a series of eminent sitters through the Beazleys. In 1941, he made two portraits of Gerald, both striking and capturing the subject’s enigma in an interesting style that combines realism with fantasy. The first is a painting in which Gerald sits solemnly, almost miserably, before the sea. He is wearing outsize gloves with red stars, holds a big, gold fish and is topped with one of Mrs Beazley’s red tea cosies. The second, more uplifting picture is a pencil drawing of a debonair Gerald in gleaming monocle and bow tie. He clutches a lobster, hinting at the surrealism and jokes he was known for, and pincered in the lobster’s claw and clasped in Gerald’s hand are butterflies, symbols, surely, of his lightness of touch, but also perhaps his vulnerable psychological state. Gerald once described himself as having a ‘lepidopterous’ character even if he was fundamentally an introvert.324 Prieto also drew Clarissa Churchill, cool and girlish, with a book in her hands; Marie Beazley, with blossoms, doves and holding a volume of Dante; and Winston Churchill, staring implacably. Clementine Churchill disliked the portrait of her husband, but bowed to pressure from Clarissa and Gerald and allowed it to appear in a book which came out later, complete with various charming, Cocteau-esque drawings of half-naked youths in shorts.325