What Fresh Lunacy is This?

by Robert Sellers

  Ollie and David were blissfully ignorant of what was happening, though keenly aware that outside their home things had definitely changed. With shocking impertinence the war had encroached upon the tranquil urbanity of Wimbledon. Trenches had been dug on the Common, accompanied by anti-aircraft, or ack-ack, gun placements, and sergeants were throwing thunderflashes at soldiers to get them used to explosions. Occasionally the two brothers would forage for pieces of shrapnel or the strange tin foil, black on one side, silver on the other, that the Germans dropped to create a cloud on Britain’s radar screens. ‘I also recall there was a prisoner of war camp at the front of King’s College [School] on the Common,’ says David. ‘And we could go and talk to the prisoners almost daily through the wire.’

  While it didn’t get the worst of it by any means, Wimbledon didn’t entirely escape the tyranny of the bombing raids on civilian London. As he was only two it’s doubtful Oliver could later remember the afternoon of 16 August 1940, when a huge tonnage of bombs fell on the area, causing loss of life and damage to property. Or had he gone from the family home by then, snatched away by Marcia and vanishing like a pantomime genie in a puff of smoke? Peter had not the first idea where Marcia had taken him; he was left behind with David to rummage through the wreckage of his marriage and work out alone what had gone wrong. Clearly the couple had been a mismatch almost from the off. ‘My father wasn’t a difficult person,’ says David. ‘He was a very easy-going person, too easy-going perhaps. Juliet, his sister, always used to say that he had no ambition.’ Maybe life in Wimbledon with Peter was just too plain dull for Marcia, who craved excitement and whirlwind affairs. ‘And she had a series of them,’ admits David. ‘My mother was quite theatrical and a bit larger than life, so my father was probably too stable for her.’

  Marcia had taken Ollie with her to Bledlow, a quaint village nestled in the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire. Home was a picture-postcard thatched cottage, the sort of emblem of England that people were laying down their lives to preserve. It belonged to a senior RAF officer at a nearby airbase, Marcia’s lover, and came complete with the matronly Morgy, cook and sometimes nanny, who read Winnie the Pooh stories to the young Oliver during air raids as they crouched inside a Morrison shelter in the kitchen. A. A. Milne’s magical creation was a firm favourite of Oliver’s childhood, as was Rupert the Bear, whose adventures in and around the village of Nutwood enchanted him and fed his imagination.

  Worried the cottage could take a direct hit, Marcia’s lover built an Anderson shelter, made of corrugated iron, out in the garden and insisted it be used during air raids. Then early one morning Oliver was startled by a brain-piercing metallic scream. A flaming Messerschmitt had skimmed the roof and set the thatch alight, before crashing into a neighbouring field. Oliver was to recall his mother’s beau gallantly legging it up a ladder and everyone passing him buckets of water to douse the flames. Once that show was over, Oliver’s curiosity hastened him to where the wreckage lay. It was an enemy aircraft all right, with a swastika on its side. Already kids were scrambling around it, taking souvenirs. Walking to the front, where the nose lay concertinaed in a grassy bank, Oliver peered through the broken windscreen and saw the pilot slumped over the controls, his face smeared with blood. ‘I was horrified. It was the first time I had seen a dead man and I started to cry.’

  This was an altogether rare encounter with the realities of war. For the most part young Oliver enjoyed an idyllic life at Bledlow, his days spent happily playing in woods and fields, buying sweets in the post office, and drinking lemonade outside the village pub. The Red Lion was the heart and soul of the community, ‘always full of reassuring noise and uniforms and the fug of sour beer and tobacco,’ remembered Oliver, whose lifetime love affair with booze and public houses of every description may very well have its roots in the nostalgic glow of these early visits. There was also a heritage of drinking in the Reed family. ‘My mother drank, not to excess, but she did drink,’ says David. ‘And as a treat at Sunday lunch when Ollie and I were very young we would be allowed a glass of beer, not a pint, just a small glass.’

  Drink was also a feature of soirées Marcia indulged in at the cottage, attended by her lover’s friends from Bomber Command. From his bedroom Oliver could hear the sound of clinking glasses and laughter, or he’d wander to the top of the stairs to observe things a little better. On special occasions Marcia allowed him to stay up late and serve drinks and sandwiches from a tray to the men, many of whom had seen action, some in the Battle of Britain. ‘They were young and full of extravagance, indulgence, elegance and arrogance,’ remembered Oliver, and they had names like Pip, wore handlebar moustaches and smoked pipes, a stereotypical image later so beloved of British war films. Oliver felt exhilarated by their rowdy bonhomie.

  Already exposed to alcohol and a drinking culture, he was still at an impressionable age when sex entered his life. Barely five, he had just pulled down the knickers of an obliging local lass in a game of doctors and nurses when her mother walked into the room. That little girl, whose mother part-owned the Red Lion, grew up to be Samantha Eggar, who went on to enjoy a successful acting career in films including The Collector and Doctor Dolittle. In his autobiography, published in 1979, Oliver claimed that Samantha was ‘my first love’. Today Samantha fondly remembers Oliver as her earliest playmate. ‘Then years later Oliver and I worked together in two films and he was worth every cent of his notorious but endearing self.’

  It was around this time that Peter made contact again. Tracking Marcia down was hardly a job for Sherlock Holmes: he’d simply made enquiries at the Ministry of Food and located her through the family’s ration book. Was he still in love with her? Perhaps so, but Peter was no fool and knew she was never coming back, instead he was rather hoping to farm out David to her care. Still refusing to fight, Peter had been working for the Civil Defence driving an ambulance during the Blitz of 1940. ‘This all happened while I was away at school,’ recalls David. ‘I remember he used to drive down in the ambulance to see me sometimes. But when my school was bombed it was decided it was too dangerous for me to stay and so they carted me down to Bledlow.’

  It was rather a shock for Oliver when his elder brother turned up at the cottage, since in the few years that had passed he’d forgotten all about him. At first Oliver didn’t react well to the intruder: running upstairs, he picked up his dog, a little mongrel called Fizzy, and hurled him over the banisters. It was an odd statement. ‘I think I wanted to impress him,’ recalled Oliver. Summoned downstairs, the two boys faced each other. David put out his hand. ‘Hello, Ollie.’ Adult faces looked sternly at Oliver. ‘You remember David?’ they asked. No, he didn’t, and there seemed to be no family resemblance at all. In fact, the two brothers couldn’t have been more different in both temperament and looks, and they were chalk and cheese their entire lives.

  Anyway, Ollie took his mum’s word for it that they were brothers and for him it was quite a novelty, because most kids got smelly babies for brothers whereas this one was already fairly grown up. Quickly they forged a close bond. In other words, Ollie smashed things, David mended them. ‘My conscious memory of really developing as brothers is from Bledlow on,’ says David. ‘We started going off to school together and became very close in quite a short space of time. I remember one of our first incidents: I was throwing cold water over him in the bathroom and he was jumping and slipped and broke his nose.’

  The two brothers romped all over Bledlow, chased cows, waved at land girls in their green pullovers, went scrumping, and dug for victory on allotments. ‘It was an idyllic country existence,’ says David. For him these are memories that are not dimmed by the passing of time but bright and clear and vivid, cherishable too, of an age of innocence and a young brother he loved. ‘I remember we used to go up to the village shop and they had a tame jackdaw that would sit on the handlebars of our cycles. I remember great excitement at the hay making with these large threshing machines. And even though the war was on and everythi
ng was rationed, farmers could still breed chickens and pigs, so we were never short of eggs and things like that. It was an idyllic childhood, it really was, and a vanished era. And the funny thing is that both Ollie and I ended up living in the country because instinctively we preferred country life to metropolitan life.’

  With the airfield nearby and bombers going off and returning, Ollie and David were conscious of the war but remained largely unaffected by it, having created their own private little world. ‘Because of all the disruption caused by our parents, Ollie and I relied on each other and led our own sort of lives.’

  David tells a charming story that seems to sum this up better than anything else. There was a comic strip character both of them loved to read about who had the ability to fly with the aid of two feathers on his ankles. ‘Well, Ollie and I got talking about this and so we put feathers on our ankles and tried to fly, but we couldn’t. “I know what we’ll do,” I said. “We’ll make a parachute.”’ Somewhere they managed to get their hands on a large tent panel with brass rings around the edge. Then they poked string through each of the rings and tied it on to their belts. ‘We decided to give our parachute a trial run and so it was decided, I being the wisest one, that Ollie climb a tree and jump out of it. It was at the point, when Ollie was at the top of this tree about to fling himself off, that our mother came out and saw what was going on and threw a wobbly. “Come down immediately!” We spent hours and hours together.’

  Some of that time was spent watching the airmen undergo survival training. This largely entailed throwing themselves off a bridge into the River Thames under the instruction of a squadron leader who, Oliver remembered, ‘had a face like a badger’s bum’. Overawed by the spectacle, little Ollie thought he’d have a go and jumped off the highest parapet, only suddenly realizing he couldn’t swim. After swallowing a mouthful of water he was dragged out by one of the airmen and tipped upside down. This airman went by the strange nickname of Lovely Gravy and he and Oliver saw a lot of each other over the next few months. He taught the youngster how to swim and catch sticklebacks and regaled him with tales of night-time bombing raids on the factories along the Rhine.

  Made to feel special by Lovely Gravy, Oliver only later came to the conclusion that the airman was probably trying to ingratiate himself into the affections of Marcia, who by 1943 had acquired a bit of a reputation in the area. Like so many women in wartime, she was dazzled by arriving Yanks, in this case staff officers with the Eighth Air Force, which had established its headquarters at the nearby Abbey School for girls in High Wycombe. Luckily for regional population forecasts, the school had been evacuated of its pupils. Marcia’s popular soirées now took on a distinctly American flavour, with more than one officer paying solo visits. Marcia loved the attention this gave her, and she was often at her best playing the hostess, effortlessly turning on the charm and sophisticated elegance. Oliver, though, was to remember his mother a little differently, as a woman from whom ‘there had never been any hugs and kisses’.

  After he spitefully hit a local boy round the head with a hoe as they were planting seedlings, Oliver ran home and, fearing reprisals, collected his few belongings from his bedroom and announced he was leaving home. ‘I’m not stopping you,’ said Marcia, in the middle of her tea, and turned her back on him. The little lad was shell-shocked. ‘I couldn’t believe it. My first great decision ignored.’ He stomped out and sat for a while on top of the Anderson shelter mulling over life in general and whether or not it was worth carrying on if his own mother was going to snub him. It started to get dark and strange rumblings were coming from his tummy. Time to take drastic action. He climbed a tree and threatened to jump, minus even his makeshift parachute. This brought everyone outside and with it pleadings for him to come down safely. It was his first captive audience and Oliver revelled in the attention.

  Would he really have jumped, ‘or was I asking my mother to tell everyone she loved me best of all?’ All Oliver remembered was that when he finally came down he chose to run and throw his arms around Morgy rather than Marcia.

  After all her fraternizing with the Americans, Marcia’s relationship with her RAF beau was on shaky ground. On hearing he was to be stationed at an airbase in Yorkshire she refused to countenance a move up north. Not only that: she rejected his offer of marriage and pledge to adopt her two sons and returned to Wimbledon. Not to Peter, though, but darling Daddy, who welcomed her back with open arms.

  Oliver found 74 Marryat Road a very different household from the one he’d just come from, and his grandfather a very different kind of male influence in his life than the largely anonymous RAF lover. You couldn’t help but notice Lancelot Andrews, especially after he’d had a few drinks, when, Ollie recalled, he would parade around the front room and the garden waving a Union Jack and singing ‘Rule Britannia’. He reserved a particular hatred for the Germans, a hang-up from a rather bad time in the First World War, when he’d had the misfortune to be gassed in the trenches. David lived there too and remembers that at bedtime Lancelot would act like a horse and each boy would take it in turn to sit on him as he carried them upstairs to the bedroom on his back.

  Lancelot had done pretty well for himself by climbing the executive ladder at the fruit importers Fyffes, and lived a comfortable life. And there was Granny Olivia, Marcia’s mother, the daughter of a Sussex farmer, whom the boys cherished deeply. Of his father Oliver saw very little: he was persona non grata with Lancelot, who, because his son was suffering as a Japanese POW, didn’t take kindly to ‘bloody conchies’. This antipathy wasn’t hidden from the impressionable Oliver, who was now of an age to believe that his mother must have held his father in similar contempt.

  A Fractured Education

  Oliver’s education was to follow a convoluted path, beginning at Wimbledon Common Preparatory School, known fondly as ‘Squirrels’ and founded in 1919 as a place of learning for the sons of local gentry. ‘Industry with Cheerfulness’ was the school’s motto and its class sizes were small, but even with the advantage of close tutoring Oliver did not shine in lessons. His only interest, it appeared, was in nature. Walking home after school he always made a point of visiting the home of the headmistress to help feed the multitude of stray cats she’d managed to rescue from local bomb sites.

  Years later Ollie enrolled his son Mark at Squirrels and always made an effort to attend sports day, wearing his old school cap and scarf, and never shying from performing in the parents’ race. ‘He was very quick,’ recalls Barry Turner, the school’s former assistant head. ‘But what I remember most about those occasions is that he was always very reverential to my mother, who’d been the school’s principal. He took great pains to be seen to be very polite, bowing and scraping in her presence. Oliver was a most memorable character.’

  By the summer of 1944 Hitler had begun upping the ante by launching hundreds of V-1 flying bombs, or Doodlebugs as the press dubbed them. Such indiscriminate bombing, barbaric in the extreme, terrified Londoners. In late July Lancelot was leaving his bank in the centre of Wimbledon when a Doodlebug struck and the force of the explosion hurled him fifty yards, killing him instantly. Within a few weeks David and Oliver were sent to Hoe Place Preparatory School in Woking, some twenty miles away. David isn’t entirely convinced that the bombing was the sole reason for their departure. ‘We were a bit of a problem, I think, for both of our parents. That’s the reason why we both went off to boarding school at what was a very young age.’

  The day of their leaving had begun so brightly. Peter arrived at the house and for a fleeting moment he and Marcia were reunited. Oliver recalled it as one of the very few occasions when he saw both of his parents in the same room together. As the boys were driven down to the school it became patently clear to Oliver that their mother and father hadn’t been entirely frank with them. The fact that he’d been told to pack some clothes into a suitcase should have been a clue, but the full extent of the horror to come only emerged after he and David had been deposited on
the school’s gravel driveway and introduced to a lot of serious people in flowing gowns. When his parents got back into their car and sped off, Oliver howled like a wounded animal. ‘My screams shattered even the most tearful boys into amazed silence.’ It took several days for the tears to subside, and even though David was there with him, this crushing feeling of loneliness and of being deserted would not go away. ‘I cried in the lavatory and the rhododendron bushes.’ At night Oliver sank his face deep into his pillow to muffle the sobbing. He missed his old life and wanted it back, but even that was already gone when news arrived that Lovely Gravy had been shot down and was dead.

  Marcia visited on occasion and David and Oliver would cherish those days. She brought with her sweets and regaled them with stories of her new life as an actress, touring the country in repertory theatre, a career the two boys followed avidly from afar. ‘We’d have a map of England with little pins on it showing us where she was playing,’ remembers David. Peter also visited, sometimes with another woman, who smiled at the children a little too earnestly. Her name was Kathleen Mary Cannon, although she preferred people she liked to call her Kay. She was a widower who worked at the fashion chain Wallis, and Peter had fallen desperately in love with her. His father was always slightly self-reserved, David remembers, and his way of revealing that Kay was someone special in his life was a suggestion that he could get the boys some socks knitted in school colours. ‘That was the first indication Oliver and I ever had that there was someone else on the scene as far as he was concerned.’