The yellow horse remained with us for a month. Then the cataclysm. One morning in summer it escaped from the stable and ran all over the croquet lawn neighing viciously, its lips twisted in disdain. This caused such a rumpus that it was touch and go whether Father or the horse would survive. For a while my money was on the horse. It ducked and dived with dexterity. Eventually Father seized a crow-bar. His attitude was so menacing that I thought he was going to hit the wretched animal on its head. The yellow horse must have surmised this too, for it galloped away, making for the main road.
A tortoise was chosen as a replacement. Father reckoned it was a more biddable sort of creature. Yet the tortoise proved itself to be in possession of the most incredible physical strength. The hare of the fable was by comparison a mere prelim boy. One afternoon the tortoise vanished, to be spotted the following day in Devizes. It had covered five miles in less than twenty-four hours. We felt this must be a world record for a tortoise. Father wrote to The Guinness Book of Records about it. Norris McWhirter, the editor, wrote back, however, raising an objection. We had no proof, he said, that the tortoise hadn’t cheated and hitched a lift in a passing car. Father and I thought this very unsporting.
The presence of the yellow pony and the tortoise must have struck at some hidden sentiment in Father’s heart, for he decided that our garden lacked live animation. In pursuit of this praiseworthy desire he decided to advertise for something called an Ornamental Hermit. Eh, what?, you may well ask. Apparently ornamental hermits had been all the rage in the eighteenth century, when it was felt nothing could give such delight to the eye as the spectacle of an aged person with a long grey beard and a filthy robe doddering about amongst the acres of one’s estate.
Mother took Horace Walpole’s dimmer view. Walpole had thought it ‘ridiculous to set aside a portion of one’s garden for a stranger to be silent and melancholy in’. But Father decried this worship of bourgeois convention. He spent hours cogitating over an advertisement that he proposed to put in a local paper. It was heavily cribbed from one such notice placed by the Hon Charles Hamilton during the reign of George II. The final version, of which Father was inordinately pleased, read thus,
Wanted. Male between fifty and seventy-five years of age. To live on the grounds of Conock Old Manor near Devizes. He will be provided with a wooden shelter in case of bad weather, a Bible, a comfortable chair, a pair of spectacles and food and water from the house. He must wear a beige or grey robe, keep his hair and nails long and on no account address anyone without permission.
Not altogether surprisingly Father received no replies to this advertisement save from a malodorous tramp who, though picturesque enough, refused the vow of silence.
Having failed with hermits, Father turned his attention to exotic animals. Lifting his head from his pork sausages one morning he remarked, ‘We really must put some animals in that wretched field.’ Before Mother could demur he added, ‘And I don’t mean boring cows and sheep.’ Mother flushed darkly. ‘So what did you have in mind?’ she demanded. Father’s response was succinct if unsatisfactory.
‘Humph!’ he said, an exclamation that always made us fear the worst.
It turned out Father had read in some zoological journal of the benefits of raising llamas. According to the article, they wafted abroad a sense of calm and well-being. Mother had the distinct impression that llamas were more troublesome than hermits and that Father should be talked out of it as soon as possible. But Father was approaching the summit of his ambitions. One of those threadbare animal circuses that existed in those days was playing in Devizes. Its menagerie included four llamas that had been trained to climb step-ladders. Father thought this a splendid joke, observing, ‘It will save me paying the gardener to prune the apple trees.’
The circus declined to sell at a mutually satisfactory price, and reluctantly the llama idea was dropped. The episode reminded Mother of a story she had heard in Hungary concerning a mad nobleman and a buffalo. Before the Second World War, the scion of an impoverished family had been trying to devise ways of supplementing his income. One day, during a visit to Budapest zoo, his attention was caught by an elderly buffalo staggering about its cage.
The nobleman, who was of a numbed, opportunistic nature, asked the zoo owner to sell it. Having purchased the animal, the man transported it to his country estate outside Budapest. He then put a notice in the American newspapers, which advertised ‘Big Game Hunting in Hungary’. Of course this was quite unheard of. Boar, perhaps, but not buffalo. A cringeingly credulous Texan rose to the bait, arriving at the nobleman’s estate one October evening. During dinner the bitter cries of the wheeling birds and the howls of the wild dogs outside seemed designed to create an atmosphere of pleasurable terror. Again and again the host referred to the fierceness of the local buffalo. The big-bellied Texan thought himself a hero of antique proportions merely to contemplate hunting such a breed.
And what of the fierce and bestial quarry, meanwhile? Merely standing up in a pen was too much for the creature’s frail limbs, and it had collapsed in an unsatisfactory heap. The Count’s footmen were forced to construct a winch and haul the animal into a truck. In this vehicle it was transported into a forest clearing where it once more sank to the ground, assuming the recalcitrant expression of a stuffed toad. Nonetheless the Texan, along with guns and beaters, was driven to a small tower customarily used for shooting boar. ‘Get up the tower,’ warned his host, waving his arm theatrically, ‘or the stampeding buffalo will run you down.’ The stampeding buffalo (singular) was at that moment being poked with cattle prods in an effort to rouse it from its recumbent state. Eventually it was persuaded to amble in the direction of the tower, where the host at once began to scream in mock terror, ‘Here it comes, here it comes.’ This unfortunate beast, which could have been shot with a pea-gun, was duly despatched by the Texan. He was delighted with his trophy and took the head back with him to America. Unfortunately fortune had laid a booby-trap. The nobleman had omitted to remove the brass nametag the buffalo had worn during its years in Budapest zoo. When the Texan was presented with the mounted head it was adorned with a label which bore the legend ‘Lili’.
Father said this story was typical of Hungarian duplicity. Had he been the American, he would have demanded his money back threefold. In any case if the nobleman hadn’t insisted on keeping so many footmen, he would not have been reduced to such schemes.
One always suspected, though, that Father would have been at home with liveried footmen. The domestic arrangements at Conock were subject to as much turmoil as the zoological ones. In the early days Father hired a cook from the village, but soon Mother and he decided to employ live-in staff. The selection of people Mother interviewed for the first few weeks was best described as disappointing. A Spanish couple were among the better candidates, but morbidity engulfed them like the sea. After preparing lunch for Father in the dining room they drew the curtains and lit odorous candles as if they were in a funeral parlour.
Finally Mother appealed to the Hungarian Embassy for assistance. The Embassy operated a sort of expatriates’ network that provided Hungarian employees as diverse as drivers, painters and professional bridge players. Mother was sent a couple who had already worked in the Embassy kitchens, the wife as a cook and the husband as an under-butler.
Wilma and Pista were to have an enormous impact on my childhood. Aside from the mother and grandmother I knew no Hungarians intimately and I awaited their arrival with joyous expectation. In the event I wasn’t to be disappointed. Every picture-book description of Hungarians was more than fulfilled in both their appearance and temperament. Wilma was as small and round as a dumpling. She had an emotional temper that revealed itself in outbreaks of stormy tears followed by gales of laughter. Sometimes she would cry with anguish, ‘I ’av a cuckold.’ What she actually meant was she had ‘a cook-cold’, an ailment she believed attached itself only to practitioners of the culinary arts. Pista on the other hand was tall and lanky, with dark hair that accentuated the
sallow tinge of his skin. He had black, questing, panther’s eyes.
As it turned out, his eyes were most often engaged in a quest for gin. Pista drank. Not just your run-of-the-mill drinking but one permanent alcoholiday.
He drank in the morning, he drank in the evening, he drank in the afternoon. When he was tolerably sober he could buttle with the best of them. Pista possessed all the charm of his countrymen in substantial measure. When Mother and Father arrived from London late on a Friday evening Pista would be waiting on the steps with a large bouquet of flowers. These were presented to Mother with a bow and a click of the heels, mimicking some scene from a Viennese operetta. Unfortunately the effect was spoiled by Pista falling drunkenly on his face.
Pista’s other endeavours caused us consternation. After recovering from what Father called ‘one of that Hungarian’s lost weekends’, Pista was overcome by remorse and determined to make amends by introducing some regimented order to Father’s beloved kitchen garden. Early in the morning he disappeared with a large wheelbarrow and a dangerous-looking spade. In the late afternoon he presented Father with the evidence of his labours. ‘I have dug up all the weeds,’ he said with tremulous pride, pointing in the direction of the wheelbarrow that was overflowing with green matter.
‘There must have been an awful lot of weeds,’ I said to Father, who fell strangely silent. He did not, for once, even say ‘Ha!’ He merely stared miserably at the barrow. ‘Those are not weeds,’ observed Father finally. ‘Those are my asparagus. You’ve dug up my asparagus bed.’
The following week Pista was drunker still. Mother fretted. She had a dinner party planned for Saturday. The guests were to be my godmother Serena Rothschild and her husband Jacob, Margaret Lane, the enamelled lady novelist, and the Marquess of Bath. By Saturday Pista appeared to have sobered up and spent the morning in a trance-like condition. When the guests arrived he had got himself into his uniform of black jacket and black tie and was standing by the door with a tray of drinks.
What happened between the drinks and the guests sitting down to dinner remains a mystery. Suffice it to say that by the time Pista arrived in the dining room to serve the dinner he was barely able to stand.
‘That man should be made to walk the plank,’ hissed Father.
‘But Woodrow,’ said Mother, ‘in his condition I doubt he could walk at all.’
The first course was fish in aspic. For a reason unknown to us, Pista had turned the hotplate up to high and placed the aspic on it. By the time it was served Wilma’s golden jelly was a sodden soup. This was the zenith of Pista’s contribution to the evening. After the guests had heroically consumed this tepid variation on bouillabaisse, Mother rang the silvery star-shaped foot bell for Pista to bring the next course. When Pista failed to arrive, it was assumed that the bell mechanism was faulty. After fifteen minutes Mother concluded that the fault lay not in the star but in ourselves. She slipped out of the dining room and made her way to the kitchen. There a sight met her eyes that would have turned strong men to dust. Wilma was leaning over the inert figure of Pista. She was weeping copiously. Beside Pista’s left hand lay an empty bottle of gin. He had polished it off after serving the aspic soup.
The splendour of the evening was distinctly dimmed. It was to no avail that Mother and Wilma attempted to revive him. Mother fetched Father. ‘Voodrow,’ she said, ‘you will have to buttle.’ Father was aghast. He considered the tribulations that such a task might inflict upon him. ‘Don’t be absurd. I haven’t any idea how to be a butler.’ But Mother was adamant. She pushed a plate of roast veal into Father’s shaking hands. ‘It is an emergency. Buttle.’
Poor Father. For a start, he could not recall which side to serve the food from. After some deliberation he headed for Margaret Lane’s right. ‘Not right,’ admonished Mother as Father began to spoon out veal. ‘Yes it is,’ said Father. ‘No,’ insisted Mother, ‘not right.’ She waved her hand to the left like a demented traffic signal. ‘Oh, left,’ said Father, cottoning on at last. He stepped sideways onto Henry Bath’s bunion. The Marquess gave out a huge howl of pain. Father careered backwards, and as he did so the tray tilted downwards, dispensing its contents of yellowing peas onto Miss Lane’s evening dress. Not to be daunted, Father tried a joke. ‘You should send those peas to Hammersmith,’ he instructed the distraught Miss Lane.
‘Why?’ she enquired in a manner uninviting of answer.
‘Because,’ said Father triumphantly, ‘that’s the way to Turnham Green.’
12
Harold Macmillan’s birthday
FATHER COULDN’T SING a note. This did not, however, deter his belief in the excellence of his voice. All through his life failure was something with which he declined to be acquainted. When a venture didn’t succeed, Father would rarely consider the hypothesis that he had no talent for it. On the contrary this was rejected out of hand as obviously untenable. Others might have called this persistence bizarre, to Father it was heroic.
Thus it was with music. My maternal grandmother had been the possessor of a slight terpsichorean ability which lent itself to occasional choral singing, her parents having forbidden the girl to train professionally. On such slim evidence Father was convinced that there was a musical gene in the family, just as there had been an architectural one. As the gift for draughtsmanship had been passed down through the generations, so a talent for singing must be lurking somewhere, waiting for a nurturing hand to coax it out into the open.
High opera, however, remained out of Father’s sphere. No matter how hard he tried to understand the stuff, its margins always slipped further and further away from him. La Bohème he found just about fathomable – largely because it was brief – but the later works of Verdi and any Wagner or Bellini caused him insuperable problems.
In the 1950s Father had been fortunate enough to see Maria Callas in Bellini’s dramatic opera Norma. The part of the spurned Druid priestess, one of the diva’s signature roles, was played to electrifying effect on all those who witnessed it. Father was the exception. During the first interval he left to smoke a cigar, returning only as the performance closed. This was unlucky, as a late supper had been arranged with the singer and her husband, Giovanni Battista Meneghini. Then at the acme of her vocal powers, Callas off-stage was made up like a painted tribesman about to embark on a rain-dance. Both her maquillage and her diet were equal to this chore. Convinced of the rejuvenating powers of raw meat, La Divina ordered a steak tartare. Father was aghast. He turned to his glamorous if somewhat forbidding neighbour with a stern warning against the deleterious effects of too much red meat.
Unused to being spoken to in such a manner, Callas enquired if this importunate guest was a qualified physician. On being told that he was a Labour MP, the lady was unimpressed, muttering something in her cello-mezzo about British socialists. The placement, however, had put Father on her right, if not politically then at least physically. Conversation was therefore at some point unavoidable.
‘Did you enjoy the opera, Mr Wyatt?’ Callas asked at last.
This opening gambit was only a partial success.
‘What opera?’ said Father.
‘The one I performed in tonight,’ replied Callas with admirable self-control.
‘Excellent,’ said Father. ‘I’m sorry I missed the entrance of the hero.’
‘You mean Pollione, the Roman general?’ the diva asked, puzzled.
‘No,’ said Father, ‘I mean Norman.’
After that débâcle it seemed to Father sensible to retreat to the more familiar pastures of light music and what used to be called novelty songs. He had a boundless enthusiasm for Gilbert and Sullivan which was refracted back through family nomenclature. He was particularly fond of HMS Pinafore and had affectionately named Mother Buttercup, after its heroine. After the works of this late-Victorian pair, Father’s favourite composition was a strange song called ‘Craven A’. As Alice in Wonderland might have said, it became curiouser and curiouser, before descending into pure obscenity.
At the end of the first line the word fornication was sung loudly to rhyme with masturbation, sung at the end of the second with equal vigour. Father liked to perform this at every conceivable opportunity pour épater le bourgeois. The more public the place, the more enthusiastic was his rendition.
My school Open Day was a popular venue for solo performances. As the parents were shown around the tennis courts, the freshly mown grass pounded by a hundred Joan Hunter Dunns in embryo, Father would draw in his chest, adjust his bow tie and begin:
‘Never heard of fornication quite content with masturbation . . .’ In a flash, all the effort one had put in to achieve a comforting anonymity, a protective covering that made one invisible to one’s peers, would be for nothing. In fact I might as well have been a flashing light.
It was not that Father never attempted more respectable recitations. Hymns were adapted with gusto and relish. For example,
‘God be in my head and in my understanding/ God be in my head and sitting on the landing.’
Or, ‘Where was Moses when the lights went out?/ Sitting on the stairs with his shirt hanging out.’
Early on, Father determined that I should take singing lessons. There were numerous other things that he thought a girl should be taught, such as politics and classical mythology; he now decreed that music too should be included in my education. A girl ought to be able to entertain people with her singing. Father decided that I might even have a career as a great artiste specialising in comic operetta. When I said I couldn’t sing comic operetta, he said, nonsense; it was easy; he would show me how. Father cleared his throat and began to sing, ‘Dear little Buttercup’. He sang it again, first as a tenor and then as a baritone. Then he turned to me and told me to sing it with him.
‘But how do you know the child is any good at it?’ asked Mother.
‘Of course she is,’ said Father, regarding her as if she had asked him how he knew that his toes were at the end of his feet. ‘She’s my daughter. Look at me, I can sing anything.’
Father Dear Father Page 9
