The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (3 page)

What passed between Gerald and Robert that first time at Vaynol is unknown. Robert somehow mistook the older man for a South African gold magnate. ‘Then people told me he knew about art.’4 Almost certainly he would have made him laugh with his knowing jokes and ruthless gossip. Though Gerald was a wonderful friend to many people, men and women, he had never been known to have an intimate relationship with anyone. He may, of course, have been skilful in his secrecy; certainly it would seem unlikely for an emotional, passionate man to have reached his age without a love affair of some sort. Robert, on the other hand, was highly sexual, and, though he preferred men, also had periodic involvements with women. Though there is no record of how the two men reacted to one another, it was clearly a catalytic point in both their lives. Those who knew Gerald described it as a coup de foudre. Not long after their meeting, they started living together.

ITLED, TALENTED AND RICH, Gerald risks being viewed only as Lord Berners, the eccentric joker, the ‘versatile peer’. Like Nancy Mitford’s minor though colourful character Lord Merlin, he can be blithely summed up by his facades and foibles, his glamorous parties and dyed doves. His image looks as managed as that of a contemporary celebrity, with a trademark style and the manipulation of publicity smoke and mirrors to create a personal myth. Hiding behind dark glasses and under hats, he went to parties in fantastical dress and posed for photographs wearing all sorts of masks, including a First World War gas mask; he was not afraid of the grotesque. He loved theatrical scenery, wind-up toys and decorated screens, and was well aware of the transformative and liberating nature of altering one’s appearance and the power of creating the right surroundings.

Many of his famous and affluent friends mentioned Gerald in their memoirs and, though his artistic creativity is acknowledged, he tends to play a humorous cameo role, often as a generous, gourmand host. Harold Acton described him as bubbling over ‘with private jokes and farcical inventions’, but, more revealingly, that by ‘constantly changing his skin, as it were, he revelled in mystification’.5 Even friends like Siegfried Sassoon, who wanted to get beyond social niceties, were sometimes frustrated by ‘the monocled peer, bowler-hatted, and imperturbable’. In his 1921 diary, Sassoon wrote, ‘He wears the same mask (it is a mask, and is, to me, consistently inhuman and unfailingly agreeable).’6 Sassoon later revised this opinion, but Gerald’s disguises and superficiality became effective screens for the complex, thoughtful man behind them. Even his fascinating social circles and the good-looking women and men with whom he liked to surround himself sometimes appear like another protective layer. All the beauty and merriment make it harder to get through to the intimate sides of his character.

Given the decorative barricades that Gerald became increasingly expert at erecting around himself, it is important to uncover the thin-skinned, lonely boy and emotional, creative youth who made the man. First Childhood and his three other memoirs (A Distant Prospect, The Château de Résenlieu and Dresden) provide many clues, even if they sometimes sacrifice objective facts in favour of a good story. Additionally, two excellent books about Lord Berners have gone a long way to confounding the stereotypes and are fundamental reading for anyone wanting to know more about Gerald’s life: Mark Amory’s Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric and Peter Dickinson’s Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter.

Gerald embraced the twentieth century’s iconoclasm and its love of experimental art forms, but he was a child of the nineteenth century. Throughout his life, he was characterised by a mixture of conformity and rebelliousness – a love of luxury and ease combined with a disciplined work ethic, an ability to play the fool while caring deeply about his creativity.

His early years bore many of the hallmarks of upper-class Victorian life that emerge in his novels and short stories, with critical or remote parents, nannies and servants at the heart of the household, and the oppressions of austere Christianity. It is an environment in which he pokes fun at vicars, well-heeled ladies and their pampered lapdogs, a contained world of rigid class barriers where everyone knows their place and where Gerald can do the subverting.

First Childhood manages to be both revealing and obfuscating: Gerald claims to be grateful for not having had childhood traumas, or if he did, ‘they lie buried in my subconscious and I can only be thankful that they do not seem to have given rise to any very serious complexes, inhibitions or repressions’. However, his book paints a picture of an isolated little boy who suffered because of his parents’ problems and was deeply unhappy at school. It is tempting to surmise that Gerald’s lack of intimate relationships as an adult was linked to his parents’ distance from one another and what he felt was their lack of warmth towards him.

Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt was born in 1883, the only child of a marriage between two neighbouring Shropshire families. His mother, Julia Foster, was thirty-one when she married a naval captain, Hugh Tyrwhitt (pronounced ‘Tirrit’), who was four years younger. Julia’s face is stern and, despite the heavy-lidded eyes, uncompromising. Gerald suspected it was her money rather than her charms that attracted his indebted father. Hugh might have been viewed as a catch on account of his titled ancestors; his mother inherited the Berners barony, an unusual title that could pass through the female line.

Julia and Hugh’s ambitions were not enough to make a success of their marriage. According to their son, they were ‘like two cogwheels that for ever failed to engage’.7 Gerald rarely saw his father, who was away at sea a great deal: Hugh was decorated for his part in the Nile Expedition of 1884–5 to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum. Admiring his father’s wit and elegance, Gerald noted how, despite his small stature, he had the ‘imposing swagger’ of someone who could be taken for ‘minor royalty’. Hugh was ‘worldly, cynical, intolerant of any kind of inferiority, reserved and self-possessed’. He apparently took little interest in his son’s education or well-being, to the extent that the young boy felt almost disappointed when, after some misdemeanour, his father said he could not be bothered to spank him.

Delving into his own subconscious, Gerald proposed that his father’s laissez-faire approach had affected him in matters of religion. ‘It is said’, he wrote, ‘that a child’s idea of God is often based on the characteristics of its male parent.’ Once, a nurse warned the young boy that if he was not careful, ‘God will jump out from behind a cloud and catch you such a whack!’ Gerald merely replied, ‘Nonsense! God doesn’t care WHAT we do.’8 Gerald’s mistrust of organised religion remained, though there were times when he wished he did have religious faith and regretted his lack of ‘aptitude’ for it, believing it to be something innate, like having a musical ear. Always keen to go against the grain, he liked to recall his hilarious misreadings of the Bible as a child, where he would automatically take the side of miscreants like Adam and Eve or Cain. Gerald used the language and trappings of Christianity to make it seem ridiculous: ‘There is a legend that Our Lord said “Blessed are the Frivolous, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” and that it was suppressed by St Paul!’9 One of Gerald’s fictional characters announces a sentiment that seems to characterise his own lack of piety: ‘When I was a child I used to think that the Day of Judgement meant that we were all going to judge God, and I still don’t see why not.’10

Underlying Gerald’s witticism is the pain of a boy who is ignored and made to feel insignificant and unworthy by his grumpy, mostly absent father. And yet throughout his life, Gerald held one of his father’s sayings almost as a mantra: ‘Never trust a man with a grievance.’ If the boy’s achievements were not enough to bring paternal praise and love, then perhaps the only way was by doing things that would jar and annoy. Playing the fool can act not only as a way of attracting attention, but of subverting paternalistic authority; a symptom of pessimism as well as playfulness.11 There remained a side of Gerald throughout his life that refused to be seen to take anything seriously; even his music was filled with jokes and parody, as though he could not risk appearing to try too hard and then be confronted with rejection. His love of disguises and fancy dress might also be linked to a fear of being himself – so much easier to put on another face and make people laugh. According to one friend, Gerald claimed to have dressed up as a wizard when he was young, so as to enthral other children. ‘Robed, masked and bewigged’, he burnt incense, rang bells and claimed as his familiar a huge white Belgian hare enthroned on a hassock.12

Gerald’s friend Osbert Sitwell suggested that he was ‘addicted to wit or humour as less gifted individuals are victims to drink or drugs’.13 This implies that joking became a significant weapon against despair, tedium and frustration. It also hints that this trait was not always a positive element in his relations with others; some thought Gerald’s teasing could stray into the realm of unkindness.

Julia was a more reliable presence in Gerald’s early years, though he hardly appreciated her maternal skills when he wrote about her later. After her death, he accused her of being humourless, narrow-minded, conventional and, like so many in her family and social class, obsessed with country sports. There was shooting and fishing, but foxhunting was her principal interest. She was an excellent horsewoman and Gerald claims that he ‘never ventured to dispute the point of view that to ride well was the main object of life’. The boy tried to live up to his mother’s ambitions, but to no avail. ‘I grew to dislike riding more and more, but the ideal of “manliness” was constantly held up to me, and manfully I persevered.’ He wondered why it was unmanly to cling to the pommel of the saddle when that was obviously helpful, or why it was manly to kill a rook or a rabbit but unmanly to hurt a dog.14

Like many creative people who come from dull or uninspiring families, Gerald was bemused by the banality of his own background. ‘My ancestors, for several generations back, appear to have been country squires or business men with recreations of an exclusively sporting nature; although, of course, it is quite possible that there may have been among them a few artistic ladies who painted in watercolours, visited Italy or played on the harp.’ Gerald felt himself to be the black sheep among his cousins and friends, living in fear and dread of humiliation because he could not ride well. While he was able to find refuge and inspiration in painting, literature and music, these were activities that counted for little among uncultured country grandees. He implies that he sprang, mysteriously creative, like Dionysus from Zeus’s thigh and he attempted in later life to distance himself from his forebears – an irony for someone who inherited a title. He mentions a story of some long-gone gypsy blood in the family, hinting that these irregular genes might have surfaced in him. Indeed, others later noted his un-English appearance, with sallow skin and luminous black eyes; ‘more Continental’ or Jewish, some suggested.15 Siegfried Sassoon described him to Virginia Woolf in 1924 as ‘a Kilburn Jew’, and she agreed – a strange indication of their snobbish anti-Semitism and a peculiarly inappropriate term to use when both knew he was nothing of the kind.16

The sense of being different makes a good story, but the truth about Gerald’s family relations may be more hazy. Julia’s diaries and letters show that while she was indeed a tough, critical woman who was more at home in the stables than the salon, she also painted and encouraged her son to do so. She and Gerald would set off on their bicycles armed with watercolour sets, and settle down to paint charming corners of the Shropshire landscape. Julia’s diaries mention her only son frequently and she wrote to him with a tone of maternal affection and concern. She always made a note of when she heard from or saw her husband, so there are hints that the family was not as cold or uncultured as they were posthumously portrayed. Indeed, an affectionate letter from Captain Tyrwhitt to his son displays an easy amicability that does not fit Gerald’s story.17

Whatever the parents themselves believed, and despite certain factual inaccuracies in Gerald’s memoirs, the boy himself did not feel that he was appreciated and loved. This sense of being an outsider was later to be used by him to his advantage, but it may well have been at the root of some of his inherent sadness. The painful boredom associated with his paternal grandmother, Lady Berners (depicted as the ghastly Lady Bourchier in his memoirs), also left its mark. Her puritanical piety and narrow-mindedness surely contributed to Gerald’s largesse, his love of luxury and, above all, his repugnance towards anything dull.

Gerald adored animals throughout his life. From school, he wrote to his mother, ‘How are cat, dogs, birds, horses, pigs, poultry?’ But his favourites were a different style from those favoured by his mother. Julia was inseparable from her horses and dogs, which included a spaniel, a collie, a fox terrier and a bloodhound, all of which were, according to her son, like her: loyal, rather dull and utterly predictable in their habits. When Gerald grew up, he would have dogs, but they would be decorative ones like Dalmatians, whose necks were hung not with practical leather collars but sparkling necklaces. Far more than dogs, however, Gerald loved birds, and these were the creatures that came to define his style and soothe his soul. ‘At a very young age I became a bird bore,’ he confessed, though as well as pretending to be a bird and making nests in the barn, he knew a great deal about ornithology. His idea of a childhood treat was poring over the weighty volumes of Gould’s Birds of Great Britain, and in later life he told a friend how his purchase of a reproduction of Audubon’s Birds of America had made his day.18 He recommended it as ‘an infallible cure for falling chins and wobbling upper lips’ – symptoms of the melancholy and desolation which always lurked in his shadow. It is eminently appropriate that the Tyrwhitt family legend tells of a distant ancestor who was killed in battle, and how the mournful cries of three lapwings or peewits (also known as ‘tyrwhits’) drew searchers to find his body. The family took the noisy, gleaming-feathered tyrwhit’s name and placed its image on their shield.