My great Aunt Vili, grandmother’s first cousin, also had tribulations with men. There is an old Texan adage: women are like rattlesnakes, the last thing that dies is their tails. It seemed a family characteristic that a Racz, who had led a perfectly quiet and respectable life, would suddenly in her seventies decide she would put up with anything for a tumble. Vili had a wonderful collection of jewels that she had managed to hide from the Communists by concealing some in the stove and others around her person. As a child I was told they would eventually come to me. How I dreamt of these baubles. I would twist them around in my mind’s eye like corsets and belts, make arabesques with them and watch them shimmer. But I had counted without Vili and her sex drive. There are men who can will themselves to accommodate unscintillating partners, but often a little inducement is necessary. Vili gave a little inducement to the taxi-driver, a little inducement to the electrician, a little inducement to a waiter and so forth. She didn’t have to give a little inducement to the doctor because he stole what was left of the jewels from the stove. So much for legacies.
I doubted grandmother would have ever got herself into such scrapes. For a start, by the time I knew her she looked as if she could chew razors before moving on, as a digestif, to barbed wire. At other times she simply spewed ire. She and Father argued continually. At Cavendish Avenue a dinner was rarely completed with all the original participants remaining at the table. My grandmother, it must be said, could have found a more agreeable way to eat asparagus. But Mother sometimes thought Father’s commentary egregious. ‘There it goes,’ he would begin, ‘not so much down the little red road as the great gaping cavern with the black stalagmites,’ and so on. Grandmother would become more and more enraged. Eventually she would leave the room and stalk upstairs muttering to herself. Her favourite word of disapprobation was ‘Borzasto’. Often I could hear her yelling it in the middle of the night. I presumed it was often directed at Father.
As she grew older she became increasingly immobile. With this her character changed for the worst. She rarely suffered in silence if this could be avoided. One of her claims was that Father was trying to murder her in some way, possibly by poison, or by sluicing the bathroom floor with water so she would slip and break her neck. In those days Father often held important meetings at home in his study. Suddenly the door would be thrown open and the directors would be treated to the spectacle of this prostrate creature on all fours, shouting at the top of her voice. ‘Save me, save me. He is trying to poison me.’ God knows what they thought of this. Poor Father was in a state of terror as to what she might do next. For a while he took the Mr Rochester line and tried denying her existence altogether. When dinner guests heard faint moaning and cursing sounds coming from the top of the house, Father would merely shrug and say, ‘Only the wind in the rafters,’ or ‘Terrible rats in the attic this year.’
But grandmother was not to be stilled so easily. One August while Father and Mother were away she walked to her bedroom window, which happened to be barred (to stop my brother and me climbing out as children). She opened the panes of glass and began to scream as long and as loud as she could, ‘They are trying to murder me.’ Of course the neighbours heard, one being a God-fearing Calvinist, bombast-and-brimstone South African Minister. They telephoned for the police. Poor Father had some explaining to do.
We often thought grandmother was like one of those mythological creatures. Every time you assumed she was done for, another head popped up. She had had practically every illness known to medical science, including a double mastectomy from cancer. She had heart attacks and even strokes, but nothing could kill her. It led Father to complain that she was determinedly staying alive in order to attend his funeral. Yet in the last years of her life he showed her tremendous kindness. Every day a bunch of fresh flowers was placed by the bedside. Sometimes he read aloud from Goethe, her favourite poet. In the end grandmother never did get to see Father’s funeral, as she died, aged ninety-six, two years before he did. But as Father himself might have put it, the old girl damn near made it.
5
Mother takes elocution lessons
THE LONGER SHE stayed in England, the more Hungarian Mother succeeded in sounding. This inversion of the normal order of phonetics would have fascinated Professor Higgins. After twenty years, the girl who had spoken almost pristine English became as impenetrable to listen to as any lugubrious Language School novice.
Gender gave her particular problems. She never seemed able to grasp it. Just as her hand appeared to close over it, it slipped away like a bright-eyed hooded snake, laughing. Time and again did I hear Mother on the telephone, complaining of some delinquency committed by Father or myself.
‘That Woodrow, she is impossible to live with. She has spent all my housekeeping money on her horrible cigars. And that child. He thinks it is very funny.’
This was Father’s fault really – not the cigars but Mother’s English, or lack of it. When my brother and I first noticed a decline in Mother’s enunciation of certain words, we set her exercises. ‘Say, “The rain in Hungary stays mainly in the Pushta plain.”’ ‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Mother stoutly. We replied that she had missed the point. It was not a lesson in climate or geography.
But facts have a way of asserting themselves. ‘Petronella says that it is always raining on the Pushta,’ complained Mother to Father at dinner. ‘Why does she say that?’ ‘Because she is trying to give me electrocution.’
Father was astonished.
‘Why do you want to electrocute your mother, horrible child?’
I explained. Sometimes with Father, explanations were a mistake. He rose to his feet and waved his fork in the air like a sceptre. ‘Your mother will never take elocution lessons,’ he declared with an Olympian air, ‘I absolutely forbid it.’
‘Why, Voodrow, don’t you want me to speak proper English?’
‘Of course not, you would lose half your charm.’
What wild, purple-tinged misunderstandings arose as a result. Mysticism, with its marvellous power to make common things strange to us, covered Mother like a raiment. Veil after veil descended on her conversation, so that listeners were treated to a mad and antique dance in which they could but helplessly follow.
Of numerous examples just one will suffice. At a party in Newmarket one evening in the 1970s, some dowager had come cringing up to Mother with the usual irritating questions, posed with mock solicitude, about the health of her family. ‘And do tell me Veruschka, how is your dear mother?’
Mother replied with accuracy of intent but not alas of execution. She had meant to say, ‘She is in Wiltshire.’
Only it came out as, ‘She is in wheelchair.’
‘Oh, how simply dreadful,’ replied the woman, patting Mother’s hand. ‘How did it happen?’
‘It didn’t happen. She decided to do it herself.’
‘How, er, sad for her. She must be suffering terribly.’
By this time Mother had become agitated and confused.
‘Of course she isn’t suffering. She’s having a lovely time.’
‘But it’s such a terrible place to be.’
‘No it isn’t.’
‘Oh well, I suppose she has someone to push her.’
‘Why would she want someone to push her? Are you crazy?’
Exasperated, hopeless, Mother got up.
It is true that life mimics farce and pays no strict obeisance to what the human race calls coincidence. Mother found out later that at the same party, in another room, an extraordinarily similar conversation had taken place between a tremulous and elderly male guest and the fiery French wife of the host, David Montagu, then Chairman of Rothman’s. It went thus:
Male guest: ‘Do tell me how your mother is.’
Mrs Montagu: ‘Well she is in a wheelchair.’ Only the man misheard it as ‘She is in Wiltshire.’
At once he beamed. ‘How lovely for her. She must be having a glorious time.’
Mrs Montagu was taken aback. �
�No she isn’t. She hates it. Except when someone pushes her in the park.’
For some reason the man assumed the old lady was participating in carriage-driving competitions. ‘You mean she takes part in races? How splendid. I wish I was in her position.’
Poor Mrs Montagu was quite distraite.
Father and I later dubbed this episode A Tale of Two Wiltshires.
There were malapropisms and there were Motherisms. Malaprop had nothing on Mother. A Motherism was the mishearing of a word based on one’s not really knowing what it meant in the first place. Sometimes conversation with Mother was like Russian roulette: you never knew whether she would come out firing blanks or a complete blinder.
There was the incident of the rubber bands. One morning Father asked Mother if she could buy him some rubber bands. She returned later with three men carrying a monstrous rubber plant. They couldn’t fit it through the front door, so it had to be left on the street until the dustbin man took it away.
My own involvement in such mises en scène ranged from the minimal to full-blown participation. When I was fourteen, Mother decided that Father had a girlfriend. She became very angry when he denied this. ‘Why do you think he has a girlfriend?’ I asked Mother. ‘Because he is on the telephone at funny times.’
‘But can you hear what he says to the person he’s talking to?’
‘No. But we are going to do something about that.’
My face paled and my spirits felt as macerated as the body of an ancient ascetic. I had no idea what, but I suspected it would be fraught with danger. The following Saturday, Mother shooed me into her car, which she drove wildly down London’s South Audley Street before stopping in front of a shop. I read the name on the front. It said, The Counter Spy Shop.
‘Why are we here?’
‘Because they sell bugs. We are going to bug your Father.’
‘Is that legal?’
‘I don’t care.’
What the man in the shop thought of Mother and me is a mystery. We must have been most unlike his usual clients, silent-stepped Saudi princes or muscled security men. But we bought the damned thing – it wasn’t cheap, I think it cost near on two hundred pounds – and took it home. The trouble was, Mother had not a clue how to assemble it. The receiver of the telephone had to be unscrewed and a device inserted. Then a wire had to run from a tape recorder to the back of a telephone in another room.
In the end we managed to do it. But I cannot say that the results were edifying in any sense. Mother always seemed to bug the wrong conversations – that is, long exercises in dullness about stocks and shares, irate calls to newspaper night editors pertaining to a dangling participle. Mother had high hopes from the dangling participle until I explained to her what it actually was. Out of sheer boredom she gave it up.
But things never gave up Mother. It was five or six months later that the British bureaucratic sytem made one of its periodical errors, a small thing perhaps to the poor minion who filled in the forms, but for those members of the population who were affected by it it was to have fantastical repercussions. Mother was called up for Jury Service.
Puzzled as she was by many institutions of her adopted country, she was aware of what this task entailed. The notion of spending two weeks in a windowless, malodorous room in the Old Bailey did not enthral her in the slightest. But even Father couldn’t get her out of this one. She went.
I believe that the first thing Mother was called upon to do was introduce herself to the eleven other jurors. She claimed that a number of them understood English even less than she did. Montaigne described those who sought to make themselves perfect by the worship of truth. British jurors, declared Mother in her darkly dramatic way, were most imperfect and worshipped nothing but duplicity. How a just verdict was ever reached was baffling. She claimed that some of them boasted of being ‘in the rap’. Not that Mother’s critique of the judiciary was destined to become an essay to rival Montaigne’s own pensées. The first case featured a poor wretch who was accused of stealing. What had been stolen Mother could not quite fathom. She thought it might have been a handbag, but then again the syllables were run together so fast that it might have been a ham sandwich.
Presently the accused was asked to speak. After he had finished his appeal of innocence to these mortal representatives of Athene, the judge inquired of the jury if they had understood. There was a lugubrious silence. Then Mother put up her hand. ‘Your worship,’ she began haltingly. ‘I have not understood anything that she said.’ The judge looked bewildered. ‘But there is no woman in this case.’ ‘I know,’ said Mother, ‘and I don’t understand anything she says.’
Once it had been established that Mother was, in today’s argot, somewhat genderly challenged, the judge went on, ‘So you can’t understand what the defendant has been saying?’
‘No.’
‘How long have you been in England?’
‘Thirty years.’
One suspects that at that moment the judge wondered where in the British Isles Mother had been. Then she interpolated once more. ‘I cannot understand a Cockney accent.’
The scales of British justice showed their fabled flexibility. Or at least one of them was burdened down by a dead weight it had never encountered before – Mother.
‘Madam,’ said the judge, ‘I excuse you from jury service – for ever.’
6
Father and Gandhi
AFTER FATHER BECAME a Labour MP in 1945, Sir Stafford Cripps chose him to be his personal assistant in the Cabinet Mission to India, the purpose of which was to secure that country’s peaceful transition to independence.
Almost immediately the British delegation was involved in a series of meetings with Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s fame by this time was such that the popular songwriter Cole Porter had included him in his musical paean ‘You’re the Top’, along with the Nile and Napoleon brandy. The prospect of negotiating with a living legend fazed even Father. Usually he employed a dictatorial attitude towards anyone with whom he had dealings. But he at once behaved towards Gandhi with a mixture of politeness and sincere veneration. The old sage in his turn regarded the portly, owl-eyed young Englishman as the equivalent of a renegade but redeemable young nephew.
Father soon discovered that Gandhi harboured complex feelings towards the British. He had some of the temperament of that eminent Victorian General Gordon, who in the words of Lytton Strachey possessed ‘in the depths of his soul intertwining contradictions’. As a political leader he desired to sway the Indian multitudes with his patriotism, once telling Father that before the British came, there were no famines in India and that they were entirely the fault of the English. Father asked for an explanation.
‘Every village used to keep a granary for emergencies in case there was a harvest failure. Then the British built the railways. If there was a shortage of food in one part, the trains could rush food to it from distant places. So the villages gave up keeping their granaries full.’ Gandhi beat his hairless chest in faux exasperation. ‘When a really big harvest failure came, over huge areas there was nothing for the railways to bring, so the people starved because the village granaries were empty.’
According to Father, he was so ready to demonstrate that all Indian ills were the fault of the British that it was surprising that he loved them. And Gandhi did, genuinely. At least Father said so.
Seldom was a personality so veiled with paradox. Gandhi could be as haughty as a chieftain, as honest as a peasant or as guileful and teasing as a fairground gypsy. He was alive to the nuances of statesmanship and the skilful management of delicate situations, but his childlike humour often got the better of him. On one occasion Gandhi was playing hard to get and refused to come to Delhi to see Father and the British. At length he relented but added the proviso that he would stay in the sweepers’ quarters in Delhi. The sweepers were Untouchables, so low in social status that they were beneath the Hindu caste system. Alarm at housing Gandhi in foetid slums, in which disease-ridden u
nfortunates were heaped on top of one another, abated when it emerged that Gandhi’s friend, a multi-millionaire industrialist named Birla, had taken over Gandhi’s accommodation problems. In a few days a large area of the sweepers’ quarters was fumigated, painted, supplied with running water, and modern drainage. And what of the sweepers, you ask? The poor wretches were tossed out onto the streets.
Father first met Gandhi in the Viceroy’s house. The man before him was small and completely hairless; as slippery-shiny as a betel-nut. He had a strangely high-pitched laugh that went hee-hee. His brain teemed with wheezes. When the Cabinet Mission refused to rule out some form of state of Pakistan, Gandhi advised the British to depart India at once, leaving her to her fate. For a time he refused to take part in further talks. Then, suddenly, he changed his mind. He would meet the Cabinet Mission at their house on the Viceroy’s estate at six o’clock in the morning. When Gandhi arrived, he at once squatted on a sofa in the drawing room, wearing only a loin-cloth. His face was as rigid as an Aztec mask. The British began to speak. Gandhi failed to answer. They spoke some more. But still, despite their intense irritation at having been awoken so early in the morning, Gandhi declined to respond. After a while, he scribbled a note and handed it to Father to read to the distinguished gentlemen who had travelled six thousand miles to see him. The note said, ‘This is my day of silence. But please go on talking.’
Symbolic gestures are thought useful by many politicians as a shorthand way of identifying with the populace and indicating to them a stance which it is hoped will induce trust. Churchill had a V-sign; Margaret Thatcher her handbags. But Gandhi outdid them all. As part of his campaign for Indian independence he sought support from the masses by demonstrating that he felt and suffered just as they did. Reaching places to address them in vast numbers was most easily done by rail. In those days third-class travel in India was very cheap and exceedingly nasty. There was no air-conditioning, the seats were wooden, rickety and filthy. The tiny carriages were filled six times over with passengers standing on the running boards clinging to anything they could hold, often someone else’s arms or legs. The smell was as high as the temperature.
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