And so it was I came to taste my first martini.
Over the years Father and the Queen Mother developed a conspiratorial relationship. They had in common a consuming passion for horseracing. By the Seventies Father was Chairman of the Tote, and in this capacity entertained regularly at racecourses. One of Queen Elizabeth’s favourite meetings was – and is – the Cheltenham Gold Cup which the Tote sponsored. When Father asked her to give away the prize, she agreed with childlike delight. The race was run in March, never a clement month in that part of England, but no matter how execrable the weather – on one or two occasions it snowed – this extraordinary woman was one of the first to arrive and the last to leave.
It was true that the crowd, which included many Irish, was one of the most pleasant in British racing. The atmosphere was reminiscent of Thomas Mann’s fabled description of an evening in a Munich beer hall; buoyed up by jollity, good humour and a seamless camaraderie. As soon as the Queen Mother appeared the cheers were like a twenty-one-gun salute, reverberating around the wintry stands.
It is not often that one has the chance to walk with kings – and to talk with crowds – but I was fortunate enough to do both. On one occasion I walked beside as Father escorted her to the paddock. The throng parted at once in a tacit gesture of affection. Elderly men and young swells; middle-aged Dubliners and Irish priests began to whoop like Indians. ‘We hope you live to 120, Ma’am!’ ‘We love you Ma’am, you’re the greatest.’ The Queen Mother flushed with pleasure. But her excitement could hardly have equalled mine. It was as though they were cheering me too, willing me on to a sort of glorious immortality by simply being there. My feet felt lighter: they barely seemed to touch the ground. Since then I have walked behind prime ministers and pop stars but I have never again experienced such invocations. She could have asked them all to die for her and they would have done so.
She was, of course, no push-over. She knew that men and women, morally, are a strange amalgam of angel and devil, and recognised this in herself and in others. She knew we can feel the loveliness of the night, the tender emotion of family love and the respect and loyalty for those we place on pedestals. For the institution of monarchy this impersonal love, she sensed, was being eroded. For there was another side to the coin. This was cruelty, greed, envy, and an irresistible impulse to dash the gilded ones to pieces. Thus the idea that was foremost in her mind was duty, or devoir, as she sometimes called it. It was only through devotion to duty that the monarchy could survive. Thus she took a poor view of the Princess of Wales for the same reason, so many decades before, that Mrs Simpson had been reviled.
Each stranger that she met was treated equally. The ancient Orphics believed in transmigration, that a soul which in one life inhabits the body of a beggar may in another inhabit that of a great king. Therefore both share the dignity belonging to an immortal soul. There was never talk of her putting someone down; not making them feel of value in their own right. There was no reason for her to take an interest in me, but she did. Moreover she remembered everything one had said, even if the conversation had occurred a year before.
She liked to have fun. One afternoon, during a blustery day’s racing at Sandown Park, I sought refuge in the VIP box to find Father and her sitting together over a plate of egg sandwiches. They were left untouched. As I approached I realised that they were singing. Father and the last Empress of India were belting out a chorus of Glenn Miller’s swing hit, ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. ‘Choo, choo, choo,’ she yelled delightedly as Father, quite out of tune as usual, shouted ‘Track twenty-nine! Boy, you can give me a shine.’
‘Well done Lord Wyatt,’ she beamed.
As she approached ninety, parties began to tire her, so Father gave lunches instead. The last time she came to Cavendish Avenue was in the summer of 1997. I had recently bought a small dog called Mimi. Mimi was a Papillon, so called because of the breed’s huge butterfly-shaped ears. She was nine months old and no respecter of persons. When the Queen Mother arrived, Mimi leapt at her and began to tear at the silk ribbon that hung from her collar. Father reacted with a cowardice of which he should have been ashamed. ‘It’s not my dog, Ma’am. It’s Petronella’s.’ The Queen Mother merely giggled. She took a shine to the silly creature and would not part from her even during lunch.
I am not sure whether it struck me at the time, but that lunch was like a valedictory. Some intuition must have moved her, because when the champagne was served in silver goblets, she insisted on passing hers around the table for every guest to take a sip. ‘We will have a loving cup,’ she said. When it came to Father’s turn I was surprised to see that he had tears in his eyes. Everyone was strangely moved: it was if we had leant over a pool in some enchanted place and had seen in the water’s silent silver a marvellous and mournful reflection.
After Father took her to her car and bade goodbye he walked slowly back to the house. ‘I don’t believe I shall see her again,’ he said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I rejoined, with a scorn that wasn’t truly felt.
He was right, of course. Within four months Father was dead. The last Empress of India sent a wreath of pink and silver roses to the funeral. We took it home with us to Cavendish Avenue. With the flowers now dried it crowns the head of a marble statue in the dining room like a ghostly Ascot hat. Sometimes, when people ask what on earth it might be, I think this would amuse her.
26
Father gets married again (almost)
IT WAS A chilly May day of the sort only the English weather provides when it senses that a preposterous range of outdoor activities known as The Season is about to be inflicted on the nation. The cab driver, having switched on the heating, turned to me and demanded with an air of geniality,
‘Wasn’t that Woodrow Wyatt’s house I picked you up from?’
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘He’s my father.’
The man’s demeanour changed and he began to shout. ‘He’s a fascist bastard. When I was at the London Poly me and my mates used to cut his picture out of the newspapers and stick pins in it.’
One could think of no answer to this save a feeble ‘Righto,’ which, one suspected, fell rather short of the mark. The French refer to esprit d’escalier or staircase wit, meaning the cut-glass riposte one has thought of only on the way home from the party. Mother and I coined a similar expression: esprit de Woodrow. This was the reply one should have made after someone was rude about Father, but only thought of when it was too late.
It happened with frequency, people being rude about Father, that is. A recognisable public figure since the early Fifties, he had, with Richard Dimbleby, started the current affairs TV programme Panorama. Dimbleby was the studio anchorman and Father the roving correspondent. I gather that recordings of Father’s early performances were later shown to BBC trainees as examples of how not to behave on air.
Fame has its own food on which it fattens and grows ever larger. After the success of Panorama, Father was offered a newspaper column in the tabloids, first in the Sunday Mirror under the editorship of the fabled Hugh Cudlipp, and then the News of the World. The latter was the site of Father’s most famous pensées, which ran under the portentous moniker ‘The Voice of Reason’.
It was Father’s columns that incensed people most. He often observed that you could always make yourself liked if you wanted to, but making yourself liked was not the point of a newspaper article.
Father had wrecked his political career by publicly opposing the nationalisation of British Steel, something for which Harold Wilson never forgave him. He was a fighter, an enthusiast, a bold privateer, determined at all costs to avoid an inglorious retreat. He was unamenable to official control and often, when placed in a position of complexity, contemptuous of the craven subtleties of compromise.
Often his campaigns involved great personal courage. One morning when I was nine I was called out of my class into the playground, where great patches of shadow lay under the large trees at its edge. A teacher, neat and grey in her taupe suit, to
ok my hand and looked at me with pellucid eyes.
‘Your father is a brave man,’ she said. ‘Like many brave people he has enemies. This is particularly true of the moment. Never go anywhere alone from now on. Always stick to an adult you know well.’
I was bemused. Who were these unseen enemies, this sinister spectral band? And why did it concern me? My imagination fed on the well of my own nervous disposition and terror touched me with her icy hand. At home Mother was standing in the doorway anxiously awaiting my return. A series of startling prohibitive edicts was immediately issued.
‘You can’t go to the park any more, or the High Street or the corner shop for ice-cream.’
‘Why?’
‘Because some nasty people would like to kill your father.’
The breath quickened: ‘Which people?’
‘The Irish.’
Facts have a way of confusing. The only Irish people I knew were a delightful couple called the Wallises whom I had met at Newbury racecourse. Why they should want to do anything so vile as to kill Father was beyond me. He could be irritating, given, but surely he wasn’t as bad as all that.
The true situation was explained to me later that evening. This was the era of the mainland bombings, the hunger strikes and the debate over internment. It seemed that Father had been writing articles hostile to the IRA. The Republicans had begun by threatening to kneecap him, should he visit Ireland. He not only succeeded in visiting Ireland but returned in full possession of his knees. Shortly afterwards Special Branch found a document listing all the people the IRA meant to murder. Father’s name was one of those near the head of the list.
For weeks we lived like fish in an aquarium, gazing tentatively out through the windows. Two detectives were there when I went to bed and they were still there when I rose in the morning. The hiatus came when Father decided that the police presence was an intolerable hindrance to his daily routine. Father was accustomed each evening to relieve himself in the garden. Once his deprivation was balanced against any threat to his personal safety the police were sent packing.
Often unbending in public, with a tendency to make the seething masses seethe further, Father in private had an almost miraculous gift for intimacy. As a child I knew something of his relations with the Little Sisters of the Poor in Camden. Twice a year, Father would take me to see the nuns. Their piety was unmarked by intolerance and was manifest by a vaulting generosity to the badly off, whether the elderly, the young, the victims of rape and assault or simple delinquents. They lived in concrete bungalows but their spirits dwelt in the mountains. It seemed strange to me that someone of Father’s atheistical tendencies should support the nuns with such enthusiasm, but if he had little faith, he did have hope and charity.
All Father’s acts of kindness were kept fiercely secret. After his death a series of condolence letters began to arrive at Cavendish Avenue which indicated that Father had acquired a large group of dependants. One of these letters was from an Asian who lived in Brixton. He had, it transpired, written to Father ten years before after he had been the victim of a savage racial attack. Father had not only visited him regularly but had sent him the occasional cheque. Then there was the Jamaican who had begun by sending Father an abusive note that suggested various interesting things that should be done to parts of his anatomy.
As a rule, all readers’ letters were answered, irrespective of their contents. It seemed to Father discourteous not to do so. But when he received a thoroughly unpleasant missive such as the above his secretary would write, ‘Woodrow Wyatt is sorry you are not feeling well. He hopes you will be better soon.’
This time the correspondent sent back a card on which was written in capital letters ‘You would not be feeling so well if you had my family and my income.’ Father wrote to him conceding defeat and signed the letter himself. Thus began a warm and affectionate correspondence that lasted the rest of his life.
Not all admirers were welcome. It was in March 1992 when I found Father hunched in his library in a state of agitation. His face was quite ashen with fear. It was as if destiny were moving him, like an automaton, to a terrible end.
‘What on earth is the matter, Father?’
A trembling hand pointed towards a chair. On the seat lay the unlikely instrument of all this terror – a large bouquet of red roses.
‘But that’s nice. Someone has sent you flowers.’
‘No it isn’t nice,’ gasped Father. ‘They’re from Reggie Kray.’
Reggie Kray! Incredulity was followed by mirth. The more I laughed the more woebegone he became.
‘It’s not a joke. It’s true.’
I examined the little white card that had come with the bouquet. Inscribed on it were the baffling words, ‘Thank you, Reggie Kray.’
‘What do you think it means?’
Father began to croak.
‘It probably means he’s going to kill me. He doubtless expects me to get him released from jail, hence the sinister thank you – and because I can’t he’s going to have me assassinated.’
One pooh-poohed this. Fate, one argued, rarely sent heralds, particularly red roses. But all attempts at reassurance increased his misery. The IRA had not succeeded in making Father quail, yet a middle-aged convict had him shaking like an aspen.
‘I’m going to write to Margaret at Number Ten to ask her to get him moved to a safer wing.’
‘That won’t help,’ I parried. ‘They can always get messages out, you know. They can do anything.’
Father waited in terror but there were no more flowers nor any communication from the gangster. Eventually Father’s mood returned to its usual state of equanimity but later that year, a few days before Christmas, came to pass an event of even greater wonder.
Father’s new wife arrived. When I say Father’s new wife I do not mean Mother. Mother had no inkling at all that a new wife was in the offing. New wives don’t usually just turn up unannounced and without observing the usual social niceties. But this one did. It was around three in the afternoon when the doorbell rang. There, standing on the steps, was a frail old woman of eighty. Her white hair fitted her head like an airy cap and her eyes, rimmed with wrinkles, were like stones in a pool. Beside her was a large suitcase.
‘Can I help you?’ Mother inquired.
The lady spoke in the cooing tones of a mourning dove. ‘I have an appointment with Woodrow Wyatt.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I am Woodrow Wyatt’s fiancée.’
Only a bemused Hungarian who has been publicly confronted on her doorstep by a woman claiming to be her husband’s fiancée could really savour the extent of Mother’s confusion.
‘But that’s not possible.’
‘Yes it is. I’ve come here to get married. I have all my things with me in this case. We’re going to honeymoon in Paris.’
Mother was nonplussed. Eventually she said with considerable kindness, ‘I’m afraid he’s not at home.’
Her face fell, then remade itself into suspicious folds. ‘Oh? And who are you?’
‘I’m his wife.’
The woman seemed to totter. She was aghast. ‘But you can’t be. He never told me he had a wife. You can’t be.’
Surprise became anguish. Tears flowed down the wrinkled cheeks.
‘I’ve come all this way to marry him. I’ve brought all my belongings. Now I will have to go back alone.’
The woman’s gaze seemed to drift off into the street whence she had come. She picked up her suitcase, turned around and walked away. She never looked back. The sweet waters of her love had been irredeemably corrupted.
When Father came home, Mother told him this strange tale. The information conveyed nothing to him. He had no idea who the woman might have been. Perhaps some poor lunatic who lived in a half-world of exotic fancy; wild puppets careering in her imagination?
Mother said she must have been a lunatic to want to take on Father.
27
The way to Heaven
THE TELEPHONE RANG. It was Mother.
‘Your Father’s got cancer,’ she said.
‘What?’
She repeated it; it didn’t sound any better the second time. Anger and incredulity vied for my emotions. Then a sort of moronic numbness took over.
Father had never had a serious illness in his life, apart from an attack of pneumonia.
‘What are we going to do?’ I found myself asking.
‘Speak to the specialist,’ said Mother. She hung up.
I knew the man. His name was Professor Pounder. For some reason my fingers seemed to have thickened and I had difficulty punching the correct keys. Usually the sound of Professor Pounder’s voice was reassuring; it was tea-tepid: E. F. Benson and cricket scores. But this time menace hovered over it like a cloud.
‘I’m afraid it’s serious. I suggest you make sure your father’s will is in order.’
‘But he’s not going to die, is he?’
‘He has cancer of the throat. It’s a nasty place to have it. We will do everything we can, but it’s no use pretending.’
‘Oh, I see.’
For some reason I was embarrassed. It was almost as if Father had committed a tedious faux pas. For the first time a transference of power had occurred.
That evening, Father’s reaction was characteristic. I found him drinking champagne from a silver goblet.
‘Your old dad’s got cancer,’ he said affably. His overtly intelligent eyes glided over a portrait of one of the Wyatt architects. ‘They say they have found a lump in my throat the size of a tangerine. It must have been growing for a long time.’
He paused. ‘Now do you want to hear the good news?’
The good news? What could there possibly be?
‘The good news is that Professor Pounder says it wasn’t caused by smoking!’
Even on those terms it was difficult to share his satisfaction.
Father was admitted to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead the next day. A laser was to bore a hole in the tumour, enabling him to swallow food properly. The procedure would be followed by a mixture of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Then, if the tumour shrank, the doctors would consider an operation to remove it.
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