Father falls in the Grand Canal
FATHER’S BEHAVIOUR ABROAD derived from that peculiar and satisfactory knowledge of infallibility that was once the hallmark of the British nation. No matter how many times in later life he was politically corrected – usually by leftish-inclined academics, Labour politicians and the more earnest sections of the Press – Father held steadfastly to the belief in English probity he had accrued in the earlier part of the century.
Foreigners were to be pitied for their tremendous misfortune in not being born into the Anglo-Saxon race. This was surely the root of all their deficiencies of character. Strenuous efforts were to be made, therefore, to jolly them along in an attempt to make up in a small way for what they had lost because of a geographical accident of birth.
Father’s idea of jollying foreigners along was idiosyncratic. Travelling with Father required a strong stomach and an almost total imperviousness to embarrassment – whether other people’s or one’s own. As soon as we left British soil he would produce from some recess of his mischievous brain an invisible wire with which to trip up the unsuspecting Continental on his pious homeward journey.
The French were frequent targets for Father’s games. As far as Father was concerned there was still the little business of 1066 to be redressed. On arrival in Calais he would hold out his passport and bellow at the astonished official, ‘My name is Wyatt. Let me spell it for you. That’s Waterloo, Ypres, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Trafalgar!’
In the 1950s Father had gone so far as to attempt this joke on General de Gaulle at a state banquet at Versailles. The general was quicker-witted than the passport officials and had a better grasp of history. He protested at Father’s reference to Ypres. ‘But Mr Wyatt, the English and the French were on the same side.’ Father, with commendable presence of mind, squarely retorted, ‘Exactly, Ypres is where we saved your bacon.’
This robust approach to social intercourse with Europeans led to incidents of a more antisocial nature. One evening, having returned home from my London day school, I mentioned to Father the War of Jenkins’ Ear, which we were studying in history class. Father was dismissive. ‘My dear child. A petty skirmish. The War of Jenkins’ Ear was nothing to the War of Goebbels’ Shoes.’
The War of Goebbels’ Shoes? How could historians have so completely overlooked it? It transpired that only Father was acquainted with this skirmish, chiefly because he had been the principal aggressor.
In the winter of 1936, Father had been staying in Germany. As chance would have it, Josef Goebbels was spending a night in the same hotel. Part of Father’s resolute world view was a Voltairian belief in human freedom and a dislike for the cheap demagoguery which he felt sure could lead only to oppression. The Nazi party, although not yet at the terrible acme of its power, came very firmly under this heading.
Father had spent the evening at a cabaret, during which some Brownshirts had pestered the clientele and taunted the Jewish spectators. On the way back to his hotel, Father’s steely-knitted composure began to unravel and his mind teemed with schemes of retribution.
Providence provided the opportunity for which he had been waiting. In those days, hotel guests placed their shoes outside their bedrooms for cleaning before going to bed. Aha! Inspiration was quick to come. Father marched down the corridor, picked up Goebbels’ slippery-shiny black shoes and threw them down the lift shaft.
Unfortunately he could not be entirely sure that Goebbels was not occupying the adjacent room or the one beyond that. So, erring on the side of safety, he picked up all the other pairs of shoes on the floor – twenty in all – and threw them down the shaft as well.
The next morning he was severely reprimanded for this by an American guest who drew himself up to his full middle height and declared,
‘Mr Wyatt, you are a disgrace to the English-speaking peoples.’
Father shot back, ‘That shouldn’t bother you. You’re American. You can’t speak English.’
It was not, I reiterate, that Father disliked foreigners. On the contrary, his gift for intimacy flowered as much away from home as it did in London. He collected for years what Mother and I referred to as the Euro-strays. Father would strike up a conversation with a stranger in a hotel bar or lobby and before they knew it, they would be encumbered by assistance, financial and otherwise, from this strange English gentleman. Sometimes Father’s generosity bore fruit and the recipient of his kindness turned out to be a wealthy count with numerous palazzi in Florence and an inclination to munificence of his own. At other times Mother and I could only despair.
It must have been August in the late Seventies when Father took Mother and me for a drive through the Tuscan hills towards Pisa. There was the soft heat haze on the land that envelops that part of Italy like a veil of yellow gauze. Father was chuckling to himself in a conspiratorial manner. Occasionally he would turn to Mother and say, using his pet-name for her,
‘Buttercup, your husband is a very clever fellow. A very clever fellow indeed.’
‘But where are you taking us, Woodrow?’ asked Mother plaintively. It was a surprise, Father said.
Eventually we reached a parched area of hill, where a few cows, like giant insects traversing an upturned pot, fruitlessly scrabbled for water. Father drove up to an old gate that opened on to a gravel path. This path led to a disused rubbish dump surrounded by two outbuildings and what looked like an ancient oil drill.
‘Out, out,’ Father exhorted. Mother and I got out. ‘Why are we here?’ Mother began anxiously. ‘What is it?’
‘What is it?’ cried Father. ‘What is it? It’s going to make our fortune. That’s what it is. That nice little man we met in the hotel in Lucca sold it to me for an absolute song.’ He paused and threw his palm up in an imperial gesture. ‘It’s going to be a mineral water plant.’
Father had no more luck searching for water than the cows had done. He extricated himself from the mineral water plant a few years later, but from then on his naïvety abroad was tempered by a conviction that many Continentals, no matter how pleasant they were as dinner companions, were, through no fault of their own, hopelessly duplicitous.
In time, however, the deficiencies of Italians were neutralised in Father’s eyes by the incomparable beauty of their country’s buildings and the inimitability of their charm. Italy became the scene of our family holidays. One August when I was six Father rented for the month a small farmhouse in a village called Nugola, outside Pisa. After the daily siesta, Mother and my Scottish nanny Diana would go for a walk, taking me with them in a pushchair.
These excursions took us, one afternoon, into a nearby forest. It was a place of almost mythical enchantment: green bowers opened out to silver olive groves, brooks weaved through banks of wild oleander; the odour of the ochre-coloured earth was like an aromatic balm.
Presently Mother and I found ourselves in a clearing. In its centre stood a partly derelict house. What nature had left standing was of near-perfect proportions. Lizards scurrying through the broken window panes and grey ivy creeping around the doors could not disguise the felicity of its design. Perhaps it was the heat of the afternoon, perhaps it was the air of magic abroad, but Mother felt she must have it. It turned out that the house was called Le Strozzato, which apparently meant, when roughly translated into English, the place of the hangman. This touched Father’s sense of the piquant. He bought it.
There is always a reason to regret haste. As its name suggested, the villa was set in a perilous location. No matter how Father cajoled and bullied members of the local council, we could never persuade it to repair the road. Potholes pitted its surface like some diabolical, pestilential tattoo. Nonetheless Father’s aesthetic ambitions ran wild. His former father-in-law, the Earl of Huntingdon, was commissioned to paint a giant mural for the dining room depicting the arcane sexual rites of Mexican gods and goddesses. On the way from Pisa airport, both the Earl and his mural went missing until a local farmer found them both trapped in a small ravine, the bonnet of Hunting
don’s hired car sticking upwards like the once-proud prow of a wrecked ship.
Once the geographical obstacles were surmounted, further hazards lay in wait. Father did not excel at clear directions, believing that these things were in any case best left to Fate. If the gods decreed that someone would arrive at a destination, they would; if they didn’t, they were not meant to in the first place. I sometimes felt that the gods must have intended us to lead very solitary lives.
Certainly the local villagers hampered rather than assisted efforts to find the house. The regal Roy Jenkins, who in the late 1970s was President of the EC, was misdirected to a house on the other side of the wood, then occupied by a homosexual Roman whose naked catamites adorned the front garden and draped themselves over the gate. Jenkins only recovered from the horrors of this spectacle when, on finally reaching the Strozzato, our Livornese cook Amelia fell prostrate in front of him.
‘I love you,’ she cried to this unlikely bella figura. ‘Presidenta of all Europe. Better than the Emperor of China. What an honour to cook for you spaghetti.’
Amelia the cook, who had very few teeth (and even those remaining seemed to vary in number), kept strange hours. This was chiefly because she wished to avoid the company of the maid. The maid, a bothersome, bovine female of about fifty, had violent fascist sympathies. The cook, on the other hand, was the sister-in-law of the local Communist party mayor.
Politics compelled Amelia to prepare her pastas in the early hours of the morning, before the arrival of her detested colleague. One night, as the moon was chased from the sky by the rosy-fingered Mediterranean dawn, the maid arrived from a nightclub in a state of inebriation. The household was awoken by screams of ‘fascista’ on the one hand and ‘communista’ on the other, punctuated by loud thwacks. These were Amelia thumping the maid with a broomstick. These shenanigans appalled one of our Tuscan neighbours, Father’s fellow Labour MP Leo Abse, who remarked to Father, ‘If the newspapers found out what goes on in your house, Woodrow, you’d be deselected.’ ‘Nonsense,’ returned Father. ‘At least I employ a good socialist cook.’
There are few of us who have not woken up in the middle of the night to find the brain populated by terrible phantom figures of chaos and violence. It is only rarely that such things become real. But they could be counted upon to do so every September 1st. How so, you ask? That day marked the opening of the Italian shooting season.
The locals’ enthusiasm for blood was not equalled by accuracy of aim. Terrible stories were told – of how a man had killed his own wife, mistaking her Sunday hat with its jaunty feather for a pheasant, of how another had shot his son. For the first few days of this orgy, Father warned his guests to remain inside the house for safety’s sake.
One afternoon Mother ignored Father’s edict and decided to serve tea on the terrace. As she was pouring a cup for her guests, she screamed and fell to the floor. A small pool of blood began to form beside her left shoulder. I reacted with my customary presence of mind and burst into hysterical tears. ‘Mother’s been shot,’ I wailed again and again.
At once Father, who had been wondering what the hullabaloo signified, uttered a cry of rage. He rushed out of the house to where the huntsmen were standing in a sullen group and succeeded in wresting away one of their guns. With his sunburn he looked like a painted Watusi engaged in a terrible war dance.
‘How dare you shoot my wife,’ he began in English, waving the gun about. ‘How would you like to be shot? I’ve a good mind to shoot you now.’
It was fortunate that the village carabiniere chose that moment to pass by from his regular afternoon liaison with the carpenter’s wife. As it often did with Father, near tragedy became absolute farce. When the policeman saw Father clasping a gun he arrested him and let the huntsman go free with complete impunity. I believe that Diana had to drive Mother to the nearest hospital.
Happily, Mother recovered and Father remained in thrall to Italy. His enthusiasm did not however extend to sampling too much indigenous produce. Whenever we ate in restaurants, for instance, he armed himself with a jar of Nescafé with which to make his own coffee. After Father had finished his pudding he would call to a waiter for ‘acqua boilito’. This request was met with puzzlement and anger. Why did the English gentleman need boiling water? Did he want to disinfect the cutlery? When the water eventually came, it was usually in a saucepan. Unperturbed by the vast size of his putative coffee cup, Father would then extract from his pocket a sachet of instant coffee. Father was very regular in his irregularity. This ritual was undertaken even at Harry’s Bar, the microscopic Venetian fine food and drink palace, where he cheerfully informed its owner, Harrigo Cipriani, that Italian coffee was ‘a thimbleful of mud’.
The antics of the ‘English milord’ – as Father had by this time become – were a legend in Venice and the Veneto. In the late Eighties we often stayed with Lord McAlpine, the former Tory party treasurer, who had bought a house near the Arsenale, and his wife, Romilly. One Saturday morning in late October Father strolled with me through the Venetian streets. Father loved that pearl and topaz city all year round, but he preferred autumn and winter, when lagoon mists covered the piazzas and the chime of gondola bells drifted up from the canals. We were to meet the McAlpines at noon, when their boatman would ferry us to Harry’s for a weekend repast of baccalà con polenta, a Venetian speciality, followed by salivatingly-scented mushroom risotto.
Father and I stopped on the way at Florian’s cafe in San Marco’s Square. Florian’s is the jewel of all coffee houses, without peer in the whole of Europe. The watering-post of philosophers and princes, lovers such as Casanova and scribes such as Hemingway and Madame de Staël is a confection of carved gilt and opalescent silver mirrors, each of which reflects its own dusty ghosts. In October it provides a different kind of scrum from the rest of the year. The café is just as crowded, but in the late autumn the premises belong not to the Germans and the Japanese but to a weird local aristocracy; epicene young counts and desiccated marchesas; people who wouldn’t set a foot in the place until the last tour group had departed for Tokyo. Sometimes they jostled with the remnants of an English or American party – but with these they had come to civil terms.
The barman was a magician, a Ganymede reborn. From behind a ledge of chrome he would produce that most elusive of nectars, the perfect Gin Martini. Father used to say, ‘Arthur Koestler was right. Martinis are like women’s breasts. One is simply not enough.’ That morning we ordered two apiece, then guiltily shared a third. By the time we had quenched our thirsts the watery autumn sun had moved to the centre of the sky and Venetians were following the delicious smell of cooking drifting out from the nearby trattorias.
Back by one of the small canals, Alistair and Romilly McAlpine were waiting with their gondola. Father looked a little unsteady on his feet. The boatman, a young Venetian with shoulders like the Arch of Titus, offered his hand. ‘Op,’ he urged. ‘What?’ asked Father.’ ‘Op!’ Father ’opped. Fortune must have been smiling on him, as he executed the movement without accident.
The Grand Canal was grey-blue as we glided past dim arcades towards the gaily painted wooden gondola posts that reared outside the entrance to Harry’s Bar. Father was becoming increasingly confident about his canal-legs. ‘I think I can do this all by myself,’ he told Mother as we docked. Mother said she would not advise it. But Father had the wind behind him and a good Havana cigar clamped between his teeth.
By this time, he also had an audience. The last party of Japanese tourists had congregated by the jetty, waiting to catch a waterbus to the airport. One of the women held up her child and said in English, ‘Look at the fat man with a cigar.’ This encouraged Father more. He perched on the edge of the boat and when the boatman offered assistance brushed his arm aside. ‘I will jump,’ he announced majestically. He jumped. As jumps go it was a long jump, a jump of which anyone, not least a seventy-two-year-old man tending to corpulence, would have been proud. But at that moment the boat pulled away from
the jetty and Father’s jump was not quite long enough. He sank like a stone into the Grand Canal. ‘Oh my God,’ screamed Mother, clasping Alistair so hard that he turned peach-stone pink, ‘Woodrow’s disappeared!’
The Japanese tourists were transfixed by this unscheduled piece of entertainment. So were a group of Venetians who had been alerted by the commotion. Suddenly, like a human periscope, Father’s head and shoulders appeared above the water. He was standing on the canal bed. His hat was still on his head, and even more remarkably, his cigar had remained alight. Father took a deep puff, as if smoking a cigar neck-deep in the Grand Canal was for him habitual. The Venetians began to cheer. They had not seen anything like it since Lord Byron. ‘Guarda il English milord. Bravo. Bravo.’ The Japanese nodded. ‘You can see why the British won the war,’ observed one sagely.
Father was quite delighted by the stir. When two waiters from Harry’s Bar pulled him out, I think he was a little disappointed, and he would have got back in again had Mother not hustled him away to change his wet clothes. Father’s falling in the Grand Canal became a Venetian legend.
Six years later, when I returned to Harry’s Bar alone, the staff were still talking of the episode. It had been embroidered slightly in the intervening period. I was mildly astonished therefore to hear ‘from the horse’s mouth’ that Father had not only smoked a cigar neck deep in water but had played ‘God Save the Queen’ on a miniature harmonica at the same time.
15
Father is ejected from the Uffizi
FATHER HAD A gift for unusual excursions. One summer in Italy he decided that my brother Pericles and I should pay our respects to the Roman Emperor Tiberius. Father, with his inexorable sense of fair play, was apt to champion some of the blacker characters of history. Richard the Third was throughout his life – Father’s, that is – a favourite recipient of his compassion. ‘It was all a plot by that blasted Tudor toady Shakespeare,’ he would roar, incensed. Tiberius was likewise identified as a victim of an invidious propaganda campaign, begun by ‘that frightful liar Tacitus’, and carried on by the early Christians.
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