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A Postillion Struck by Lightning

Page 16

by Dirk Bogarde


  He had realised, as have done others before him, and since, that though he had a tremendous physical presence and a beautiful voice, he had not got the spark for greatness. He had started in the theatre too late in life and could not adjust, totally, to this glittering world which he so adored but felt a little lost within.

  Not so his daughter Margaret. The moment she hit the Stage, at eleven or abouts, she was On. And at the Haymarket, while Grandfather played a tiny part as an old shepherd, his daughter bounced over a canvas wall as the Ingenue. Both their fates were, to some extent, sealed. After “Bunty” closed he went sadly back to Scotland and left his daughter hooked for life. Back to the big family house in Langside, back to his resentful and by now deserted wife, who was rightfully resentful, back to his family of ten who hardly knew him and were so deeply cloaked in their own respectability that they no longer wished to.

  Mother was the Lost Sheep. And although they all tried to settle her back among them, she refused to remove her lipstick, and yearned to go back to the South. Which she did pretty quickly, using the Wounded Soldiers, and her charming talent, as an excuse. Her high spirits, her jollity, her very unusual beauty and above all the great warmth of her heart and her adoration for the world at large saw to it that she never failed.

  Until the night of the Chelsea Arts Ball in 1920 … and that can hardly be called a failure. A change of direction certainly; and I never cease to thank God that she took it.

  I have said that we, as children, hardly ever made friends. This is not strictly true in the case of about four people, three of whom were at school with me, the other, a girl, who was Italian and lived in a large tumbling Roman family not very far from us. Her name was Giovanna and she was my sister’s Best Friend and they went to school together at a large convent, pleasantly set in walled gardens. The other three were, strictly speaking, my Best Friends, although they might not have considered me as such. For they were seldom invited into the walls of my Centre and our friendship existed for most of the time during school.

  My nearly closest friend was Jones G. C. He was called Minor to distinguish him from another Jones who was Major and who bullied me without pause, “bumping” me on the Playing Fields, shoving powdered glass down my neck during Physics, and generally behaving in a thoroughly disagreeable way. But Jones G. C. was very quiet, a studious boy who lived in a big house in Finchley Road and kept toads and birds and wore thick hornrimmed glasses. He was as hopeless at Games as I, and was a willing participant in my Plays because he could just read his books until he had to say his lines and no one bothered him. Not even Jones Major.

  Foot was very fat. As fat as any boy I ever knew. It was rumoured all over the school that the reason for his weight was not so much that he ate prodigiously, which he did, but that his testicles had failed to drop. This made him rather interesting and a great deal of time was spent at the Showers and in the Changing Rooms to verify this anatomical disaster. No one, it seems, was convinced. And no one ever actually got the chance to clearly find out, for he was as delicate in his undressing and showering as a nun. And even Jones Major didn’t do very much about him. Foot ate and read a great deal. He wore thick pebble glasses, and dribbled. He also hated Games, with a dull passion, played all the fat boy parts in my plays and bored a hole with a hat-pin through his mother’s bathroom door so that we could all peer at her, with one blurred eye, having her bath. I found this a rather dismal thing to do; she was as fat as he was and just as unattractive.

  Trevor Roper was the third and last of my Friends. A tall vibrant boy, who more or less Designed the plays. While I did the writing and directing and casting, and all the acting if I could, he arranged the sets, the seats, the curtains, and lights when needed. He was alive, vivid and busy. Once, as a visitor to our house on a reconnaissance trip to find a suitable stage in which to perform a new play we had written in tandem, he discovered, to his delight, the big bay window in our hall, and with a flourish, which startled my mother, made swift plans to rig curtains, fix lights and turn the place into Drury Lane with a few nails and ten yards of velvet. I pointed out that there was no exiting space left and right of his Proscenium Arch. Merely wall. He airily decided that we should remove all the windows and make our exits and entrances into the garden. It seemed a logical idea to everyone but my mother.

  The play was abandoned for the time being.

  We made a solid group of four wandering about the grounds of the school in an inseparable block. Discussing plays and stories and who to cast as what. Until my brother was born.

  Two days into shock I returned to my friends and told them of the news. They were all suitably amazed. Foot, whom we called Elephant because of his name and not because of his size strangely enough, was horrified. “Your mother’s so terribly old. I think it is disgusting. Fancy having a baby as old as that. It might have killed her!” She was, of course, very old. Exactly thirty-three. Trevor Roper found it all unpleasant and decided not to comment beyond saying that it was “jolly hard luck” on me. And Jones G. C. looked very vague and wondered, aloud, how it could have happened.

  “I know,” said Foot. “It is all too simple, and that’s why people should be more careful about where they pee.”

  We all looked a little surprised; even Trevor Roper was intrigued. Foot explained that all you had to do to have a baby was for the father and mother to pee together into the same chamber pot, and the baby came out of the mixture as a sort of amoeba. It didn’t at all convince Jones G. C. who was very good at Botany. And although I knew, because I had been given a small book by my father and looked at the pen and ink drawings, I was not about to tell them. The book was impossible for me to understand from the written point of view, but the diagrams were simple and easy to follow and although it all rather put me off and made my sister scream when I told her up under the lilac one day, I went along with it and obliterated what I could not understand. Or chose not to understand.

  I tolerated Giovanna Govoni because she was very, very nice and nearly like a boy. And although she was strictly speaking my sister’s Best Friend, she was often at the house and kept out of my way so I was not disturbed. On the other hand she seemed to be interested in snails and frogs and stick-insects, and kept goldfish. Which brought her nearer to me than the fact that she spent hours with my sister looking at this absurd baby which had crashed into our midst.

  There was another reason for my liking, even accepting, Giovanna as a friend. And that was her mother’s cooking. When you went to their house, not unlike our own but a bit bigger with an old chestnut tree in the garden, it was not at all like going to anyone else’s house I knew. Although the walls, and rooms, and even the furniture, conformed to the English Style in every conceivable way, the atmosphere within those walls was more Roman than it was London. There was always a most delicious smell of cooking. Of basil, of garlic, of rice and of olive oil. The family, Uncle Gianni and Aunt Isali plus their twin sons, Italo and Mario who were very much younger than we were, filled the house with music, laughter, screaming, and violent conversation which I found both stimulating and exciting. Coupled with the cooking smells, a great bowl of goldfish on the sitting-room mantelpiece, there was also the constant and delightful presence of Madame Chiesi; she was Giovanna’s grandmother on her mother’s side, a tall elegant woman from the Swiss border, who spoke no English and spent most of her time sitting in a high-backed chair, dressed in black with little white frills, sewing, knitting or making something fragile in threads and silks. I adored her, even though we never spoke a common language. She soothed frayed tempers, found the sweets when needed, scolded and laughed and spread love about her like a bounty.

  Giovanna’s mother, Isali, was a little younger than our mother, fair and blue-eyed, very strict and correct but always bright and busy in her kitchen making great bowls of pasta and soups filled with as many delights as a Christmas stocking. She very soon took my mother, and her kitchen, in hand and for a long time to come our house was filled with th
e most delicious aromas, and great cotton sacks of rice and pasta which came from as far away as Milan and Verona. Lally mournfully observed that we all ate more rice than the entire Chinese Nation, and that rice, correctly cooked and prepared, should be served with a bay leaf, honey, and a crisp golden apron. She glumly forked her way through endless Risotto alia Milanese, Risi e Bisi and Risotto Rusticos with a face like thunder and a growing weight problem.

  Apart from all the laughing, quarrelling, Italians in the house with the chestnut tree, there was also Bertha.

  She was German, blonde, strong, very jolly and came from Hamburg. She spoke dreadful English which delighted us all, for the Govonis spoke fluently, and smelled appallingly. However, she was kind, loved children, especially the twins, Italo and Mario, and never found anything too much for her to do. Every afternoon, wet or fine, she would stand on a rug in the middle of the garden, dressed only in an ugly black and white swimming suit, with a big tin alarm clock ticking away beside her, and do her “Physical Exercises” much to our delight and, at first, astonishment. When the alarm went off she stopped, took three or four deep breaths, picked up the rug and the clock and marched back into the house to start the tea. It was her Strength Through Joy, she said.

  We merely thought she was a bit touched in the head, and let it pass. No one else we knew put on a bathing suit and did gymnastics in the back garden with an alarm clock, and no one else we knew went on holiday with a rucksack and a collapsible kayak to canoe round the West Coast of England for their summer holidays. We were aware that she was not joking, or bragging, because she was also an ardent photographer, and one of the special joys of having Bertha home again was to go up to her very smelly little bedroom and sit on the bed amidst the debris of the rucksack and the bits of collapsible kayak, and look through all her “snaps”. Views of Swanage, of Bournemouth Pier and Portsmouth, of cheerful groups of brown, sweaty people, waving and laughing at the camera on miles of beaches from Penzance to the Tilly Whimm Caves. She never seemed to miss a trick, and most of them delighted us. Presumably we were not the only ones meant to be delighted.

  My father was the only one of us who seemed not to join in our general delight with the Italian Family. He was uncomfortable with Gianni, whom he considered to be a Blackshirt, and found the noise and hurly-burly, which so enchanted us, tiresome and unrelaxing. However, he smothered, as best he was able, these feelings, and we all managed a more or less comfortable relationship. It is unlikely that Gianni, who was a member of the Staff at the Italian Embassy, was a Blackshirt, if so an unwilling one. He was an Italian, and deeply proud of his country. However, none of this even remotely concerned me at the time. I had quite enough to worry me.

  The resentment of my new brother was compounded by the fact that because of him and his untimely arrival, in the very middle of the summer holidays, we were unable to go, as usual, down to the Cottage. And so the long hot summer was spent sweating away in London, with occasional treks to the Heath or Kenwood for walks and “a breath of air”. Although I hated it all, I wished for it not to end, for I knew that with the end of summer came the trip to the North, to a foreign school, to new people and to a new life which, in spite of my Aunt and Uncle’s warmth and affection, I dreaded. Wisely, and with great tact, Lally said that it was time we all grew up, things had to change, and we couldn’t have it all our own way. Reckoning that MY way was the best way for me I was loth to put it aside. I disliked change of any kind, and I was secretly deeply afraid of having to grow up and go off on my own, a thing I knew was bound to happen one day or another. I preferred another.

  I said goodbye to Miss Polyphemus, to Miss Garlick, to Dr Chanter and to weary Dr Lake, gave Jones G. C. all my “Just William” books and left the school on the hill for the last time.

  No one seemed very sorry to see me go; they were all pretty busy getting ready for their own holidays to bother about me anyway.

  Dr Lake wrote a very pleasant letter to my father saying that I was an “amusing companion and a nice fellow”, and that he wished me well. And that was that.

  The summer, stuck away in London and far from my beloved gully and Great Meadow, was going to be a long, dull, time. But I realised that I’d better make the most of it.

  One morning, very early, before the sun was up, the telephone rang and startled me out of sleep. The telephone was no strange device in our house. We were more than used to it attached as it was to Printing House Square. At all hours of the day or the night it rang with the news that a King had fallen off a rock, a Golden Eagle had hatched near Inverness, a Queen had been killed in a car crash, or a President had jumped out of a window.

  We were never surprised by the odd items which filtered into the Nursery, and none of them appeared, at the time, to touch our golden lives. Until this one.

  I heard my father answering the machine in his bedroom across the wide landing from mine. I heard him speaking for a long time … not hearing the words but being unmistakably aware that whatever he was being told was urgent, worrying and concerned him personally.

  I lay looking at my tit-and-wisteria paper and wondered vaguely if it was anything to do with me or school. But nothing was said at breakfast, even though I could see, with a stab of surprise and alarm, that my mother had been crying.

  Later, up at the top of the garden where I had built a rather rickety hut in which I painted and wrote my countless plays and stories, she came to see me.

  I was making some puppets, I remember, and she vaguely admired a scrap of old brocade which I was using for a costume. “It came from those old curtains you gave me,” I said. But she was looking sadly out of the dirty window into the garden and not listening to me.

  Presently she turned round and said in a weary voice: “I want you to listen to me very carefully. Daddy and I have to go down to Brighton immediately. It’s very sudden and very urgent and we might not be home until tomorrow. You’ve got a new grandfather.”

  Chapter 10

  Aimé Emile van den Bogaerde was a tall, dashing, handsome man with great amused eyes and a faded fortune when he met my grandmother Grace some time in the late 1880’s.

  I don’t know very much about him, because my father hardly ever mentioned his name to us as children, and all that we vaguely knew, and it was very vague indeed, pieced together from scraps sought or heard here and there, was that he had gone to South America as an explorer and died there of yellow fever.

  He came from an ancient, Catholic family which traced its origins, I am told, to Anne of Cleves, but which finally settled, at the end of the sixteenth century, near Iseghem, a small town in the centre of the orchard country of what was then the Low Countries and is now Belgium. The name, van den Bogaerde, means “of the Orchards” and the coat of arms incorporates three fruit-laden apple trees. That the family was gently noble at its start is not in dispute; however, it apparently slipped towards the Sea (some were to become Admirals) and the Land. From the Land they moved into Law, and my grandfather was born to a famous judge and appears to have lived the life of any other rich gentleman of his time. Part of his education was the traditional Grand Tour which he made with two tutors and an enormous Great Dane. He travelled from Brussels to Paris, Berlin, Munich, Venice, Rome and eventually, London. Liking the English, speaking their language fluently, and being rich and handsome and young, he was attracted to the County Life and spent a great deal of his time in various parts of the shires riding, hunting, shooting and generally enjoying the hospitalities of the larger country houses to which he was invited, or had “letters of reference”.

  It was while he was in Worcestershire that he met, and fell in love with, Grace Clark of that county and married her. I have always been told that the Clarks were so horrified at the idea of their golden, slender, child marrying a Foreigner that they sent her to a convent. And from there my grandfather kidnapped her and they ran away and got married. But that is legend. And I very much doubt that it happened. However, it well might have for my grandfath
er was an impetuous, determined man, and Grace a rather timid, gentle, creature who could just about blow her own nose for herself. But she had some will. She firmly refused to live Abroad, embraced the Catholic faith and forced him to buy a large villa in Perry Barr, then a small, pleasant village, just outside Birmingham. To be near her family one supposes. They lived very well. There are photographs of the house, many gabled, with trim lawns and great cedars, coachmen and horses, dogs and maids and my grandmother in vast hats and long silk dresses. My father was born there in 1892 and spent the first few years of his life, a solitary child, happily enough with his little pony cart, his dogs Sherry, Whiskey and Soda, and my grandfather’s Great Danes. The favourite of which was called Rosé.

  My grandmother, like so many converts, became more Catholic than the Catholics, if that is possible, and made my grandfather’s life complicated and tiresome. There was never to be another child apart from my father, because she believed, strictly, that sex should only be accompanied by the birth of a child, and this my grandfather resented. Some time—and here I get vague because I am lost for the facts—some time in the early 1900’s he went on a journey to London. He never returned to the sprawling ivy-covered villa in Perry Barr with its cedars and lawns and Converted Catholic mistress, but took ship for South America from whence he was occasionally to write, and send my father photographs of his trips up the Orinoco (he was one of the first white men ever to get as far up it as he apparently did) and from the Amazon and various seedy little villages in Brazil.

 

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