Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  FAST

  & Louche

  FAST

  & Louche

  Confessions of a flagrant sinner

  JEREMY SCOTT

  Four or five of the names in this memoir have been changed to spare embarrassment to the living and because of the author’s characteristic discretion.

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by

  PROFILE BOOKS LTD

  58A Hatton Garden

  London ECIN 8LX

  www.profilebooks.co.uk

  This eBook edition published in 2010

  Copyright © Jeremy Scott, 2002, 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Typeset by MacGuru Ltd

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Photographs: Nanny © David Scott; Jeremy with two models © Terence Donovan; Jeremy and Peter Mayle © Jennie Mayle; Gortyna borelii © Natural History Museum; Tania, Jenny Beerbohm and Jamie photographer unknown

  eISBN 978 1 84765 375 8

  To Jamie, with love.

  And for Ernest and Christie, Peter and Jennie,

  The Fishers and Ramage;

  the best friends imaginable.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 Dumbleton

  2 Arisaig

  3 Stirling

  4 Davos

  5 Stowe

  6 London

  7 Suez Canal

  8 Germany

  9 Gilston Road

  10 Connecticut

  11 Manhattan

  12 Vienna

  13 Jordan

  14 Mayfair

  15 New Bond Street

  16 Pont Street

  17 Virgin Islands

  18 Chelsea Police Station

  19 Manhattan

  20 Ten Downing Street

  21 Côte d’Azur

  22 La Cagne

  23 Arcadia

  24 46 Lower Belgrave Street

  25 Earls Court

  26 Claridge’s

  27 Gilston Road

  28 Westminster Hospital

  29 Waitrose

  30 Arisaig

  31 Where the Ghost Leads

  Index

  Prologue

  On Easter Sunday Father killed and ate a dog. He and the man with him cooked it on a Primus in their tent after yet another unsuccessful day spent searching for their companion, buried alive 8,000 feet up on Greenland’s ice cap.

  In 1930, four years before my birth, Father, J. M. Scott, was one of a party of fourteen young men who sailed to the Arctic to pioneer a route for the first commercial airway from Europe to North America. The party was led by Gino Watkins, aged twenty-three, who like Scott had just come down from Cambridge but had already led two expeditions to the Arctic. With a love for jazz, dancing and sports cars, foppishly dressed, Gino did not resemble most people’s idea of an explorer. One fellow undergraduate said he looked like a ‘pansy’.

  The proposed air route lay over the coastal mountains which were of unknown height, then for 500 miles across Greenland’s unexplored ice cap, the most hostile environment on earth. Gino’s plan was to survey and map the coastal range but, crucially, to set up a meteorological station high on the ice cap, which – manned in shifts for one year – would record temperature, wind and weather conditions six times a day. Nobody before had ever passed a winter on the ice cap, much of which is in 24-hour darkness. No one on the expedition or elsewhere knew what to expect.

  That August Scott guided a party up the glacier leading onto the ice cap. Winching up the sledges and hauling up their dogs by rope, it took them six days to travel the first fifteen miles. In the next ten days they sledged a further 112 miles into the frozen desert to set up the weather station, a nine-foot tent equipped with a full range of meteorological apparatus – but no radio or communication with the outside world.

  The two men left to man the station were replaced by two others in late September while the weather was still good. In November the party which set out to relieve them was pinned down for so long by blizzards they had consumed most of the food and fuel intended for the station by the time they finally reached it. Either it must be abandoned or one man alone must staff it through the winter until he could be relieved. Courtauld, another Cambridge undergraduate and heir to a family fortune, volunteered to do so.

  Arctic winter closed in. On 8 December the sun failed to rise, not to be glimpsed again for weeks. Gales raged continuously. The Base anemometer recorded 129 mph before it blew away. At the weather station high on the ice cap conditions were worse.

  At the end of February Gino said to Scott, ‘I’m afraid someone will have to go and fetch Courtauld while the weather is still bad. I’d like it to be you.’

  Scott took one man; each drove a dog sledge. One of these broke in half on the glacier, then a blizzard pinned them down for days. It took three attempts to get going. After seventeen days travelling in appalling conditions he calculated they were on the latitude of the station and within a half-mile of it. Marking off a grid with flags, they began to search for it. Most of the time the weather was atrocious and visibility reduced to a few yards. When the low sun did appear the snowscape became a zebra pattern of bright crests and dark shadowed troughs. It was like looking for a man overboard in a rough sea. They spent the next three weeks searching the area … and could not find Courtauld.

  By 15 April, having already eaten two of their dogs, there remained three-quarter rations for only four more days. The decision to abandon the search was Scott’s as leader of the party. Having taken it, they raced back to Base, travelling in any weather and running the crevasses blind in darkness. On the final stretch the exhausted dogs were no longer able to pull the pathetically light loads. Dumping the sledges, men and beasts stumbled the last miles to Base where Scott gave Gino the news.

  Taking two men Gino set out at dawn on the 130-mile journey to the weather station. Scaling the glacier, he and his party raced towards where Courtauld lay buried. On 4 May they knew they must be near; almost at the same moment the three saw a dark speck half a mile away. As they hurried nearer it became a very tattered Union Jack, three-quarters hidden by the snow, but everything else was entirely buried beneath a huge drift. There was no sign of life, but as Gino climbed the drift he saw an inch or two of ventilating tube projecting above the surface. He knelt over it, shouted … and a voice came back. Entombed beneath the ice cap, Courtauld had been isolated in his tent for 149 days.

  Gino, Courtauld and Scott were changed for ever by the Arctic. They’d lived in a vast white empty world of cruel beauty and truth. To face the adversities they encountered there required comradeship, resolution and courage; their lives were simple, pure, their purpose clear. Afterwards, what could match the intensity of that experience?

  Along with the others Scott never adjusted to everyday life. But he was also changed in another way. His failure to find Courtauld altered his personality, turning him into a misanthrope who needed drink to become whole. Forever afterward he believed himself a failure and the conviction would poison and ruin his life.

  While together in Greenland he and Gino had at one point been caught in a jam they thought they might not escape from. Gino was not without responsibilities. His mother
was dead, his father expiring from TB in a Swiss sanatorium. His sister Pam and brother Tony, both younger than he, were living almost without funds in a rented house in London, looked after by Nanny Dennis who had been with them for over twenty years. By nature insouciant, Gino had inadvertently become head of the family. Now in Greenland he said to Scott, ‘If anything happens to me, look after Pam’.

  The two managed to extricate themselves from that particular hazard, but on the second phase of the Air Route Expedition in 1932 something did happen to Gino. He went out alone in his kayak, hunting seal among the ice floes to feed his party … and disappeared. His kayak was found floating half full of water, and his trousers soaking wet on an ice floe, but his body and rifle were never recovered. The accident – if accident it was – remains a mystery.

  Scott was a representative of his period and class; he believed in duty, honour and the manly code. He did the right thing and married his drowned leader’s sister, Pam – a woman whose temperament and tastes could not have been more different from his own.

  In the year following the couple’s wedding they had a son, whom they christened Jeremy Gino Scott – myself.

  1

  Dumbleton

  The day started with Nanny drawing the curtains in my bedroom to let in the sun. ‘Come on sleepy-head, let me get your togs on,’ she said fondly, dressing me in girl’s clothes as was the fashion in the late ’thirties.

  I lived in two rooms, the day nursery and the night nursery, at the top of a house in a quiet tree-lined street in South Kensington. Breakfast was with Nanny and Mrs Reeves the cook in the basement kitchen; my parents ate theirs in the dining room on the floor above. Father, who had the square jaw and rugged handsome looks of an action hero, champed on salted porridge behind his newspaper while Mother chattered brightly and unsuccessfully. Finishing his oats in silence, he slipped a climbing rucksack over his suit and set off for the Daily Telegraph in Fleet Street, today as every day ‘by Shank’s pony’, as Nanny put it.

  My own walk came later in the day. Pursuing a life which, even then, inclined to be more idle than his, I took it in a pram. Through streets almost free of traffic Nanny and I walked down the Fulham Road past run-down shops selling hardware and artists’ materials, a dairy with a stable, and the Boucherie Chevaline, a horse butcher, though we never went down Park Walk as she said ‘rough people’ lived there.

  After lunch I took a nap and played with my toys in the day nursery while Mother visited art galleries and exhibitions and met for tea at Harrods or Fortnum’s with her numerous and all much richer cousins. I was taken to join her when she returned. ‘Hello, my little treasure,’ she cried in her piercing upper-crust voice as Nanny brought me in, ‘And have you been utter utter blissikins today?’

  ‘More trouble than a barrel-load of monkeys, I do declare,’ said Nanny, and I’d be delivered over.

  Mother was a thin dark-haired woman with a delicate bird-like face, a nervous distracted manner, and a small inheritance. She was uncomfortable with touch or people too close to her. She read to me from Babar the Elephant or we did a jigsaw puzzle until Father came home. We shook hands as he wished me goodnight.

  Nanny took me upstairs, put me in nightdress and tucked me up. ‘Now off to the land of Nod,’ she said.

  One of eight children of a Leicestershire farm labourer, Nanny had gone into domestic service at the age of fifteen, working for Mother’s cousins in their country house. She’d had to provide her own uniforms and trunk; her family had gone short to buy them. Her wage was £12 a year, paid quarterly in arrears. She had risen from the job of skivvy, getting up at 4.30 am in order to clean the grates and lay the many fires, to that of nursemaid. She went to work for my grandmother in Eaton Place in 1909, on my mother’s birth, remaining with Mother until her death in 1973, by which time she was earning a wage of £5 per week which often went unpaid. Throughout those sixty-four years of unbroken service Mother had no idea in which drawer her own underclothes were kept. As a child it was Nanny who raised me, not my parents, and her I loved, not them.

  Our weekends were passed at the country houses of relatives, usually at Dumbleton in Worcestershire. We drove there in the rickety car Father had bought for £20. Nanny and I travelled in the back with the luggage; Mother rode beside Father, wearing around her neck a dead fox with angry red eyes and a cruel jaw snapped shut on its own tail. ‘I wish you wouldn’t overtake,’ she said at times, ‘It uses up a frightful lot of petrol.’

  Dumbleton was a twenty-bedroom Victorian Gothic pile set in a park containing its own church, cricket pitch, pavilion and lake with water lilies and a punt. It belonged to Mother’s uncle, who was First Lord of the Admiralty, and Aunt Sybil.

  Uncle Bobby, Viscount Monsell, had risen to eminence and wealth from unpromising beginnings. The sixth child of an impoverished Irish family, his grandfather, a clergyman, had written the rousing hymn ‘Fight the good fight with all thy might’. Entering the navy as a midshipman at the age of fifteen, Bobby set out to fulfil its exhortation to ‘lay hold on life’ in his own way. Almost wholly uneducated, he possessed enormous charm. Barbara Cartland, who knew him when she was a debutante, called him the most handsome man she had ever met. Inspired not only by the hymn but through the example of his father, who had wed an heiress, he married an heiress of his own when only twenty-two. For his bride Bobby chose Sybil, the large, ungainly, pathologically shy only daughter of the Birmingham industrialist who had invented the zip fastener.

  A gregarious and witty man, he enjoyed entertaining. At weekends Aunt Sybil sat at the foot of a table set for twenty-four, picking distractedly at her food and tortured by embarrassment while trying to think of something, anything, to say to those beside her, as from the other end of the table gales of delighted laughter reached her from the charmed circle of animated guests grouped around her husband.

  Appointed First Lord in 1932, Uncle Bobby’s job and social life kept him mostly in London while Aunt Sybil remained at Dumbleton giving birth over the years to four large children of which Graham, the only boy, became Comptroller of Military Intelligence during the war and, according to Mother, a Soviet spy. Uncle Bobby did not play a major role in their upbringing for family life failed to enthral him and, in time, he left Aunt Sybil to marry a younger and smaller woman.

  By then he’d retired from his country’s service. The summit of his political career was to negotiate and sign for Britain the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, criticised by Sir Winston Churchill as ‘a most surprising act … it effectively removed all restraint to German naval expansion and set her yards to work at maximum activity’. In the Second World War which followed, it resulted in the deaths of hundreds of British and American seamen and the loss of countless tons of Allied shipping. The German negotiating team was led by von Ribbentrop, who was a frequent guest at Dumbleton during the protracted negotiations in the course of which he and Uncle Bobby became close friends. Indeed the house’s drawing-room curtains, a set of heavy velvet drapes covering the french windows and decorated with a bold motif of Nazi swastikas, were a personal gift from von Ribbentrop at the conclusion of the agreement and proved of such enduring quality they still hung in place thirty-five years later when I visited Dumbleton after it had been bought by the Post Office for use as a residential country club for its employees.

  But as an infant I was unaware of Uncle Bobby’s illustrious career. I spent the weekend segregated upstairs in the nursery, while Nanny’s life centred on the servants’ hall. I was a year old apparently before I had the pleasure of meeting Uncle Bobby face to face. The story is Mother’s, for I don’t remember the occasion, but it seems that one morning I was in my pram on the gravel sward outside the house attended by herself and Nanny when Lord Monsell stepped out the front door in tweed suit and hat, carrying a cane and pair of gloves, about to start on his own morning constitutional around the park. Sitting in my high pram I was on my part equally well dressed in an attractively embroidered lace smock and look
ing my best. As indeed was Mother, who positively glowed with pride in the little treasure she’d borne into the world.

  Emerging from the house, the First Lord threw a brief glance towards our little group before setting off briskly in the other direction. But Mother wanted to share her bounty. ‘Oh good morning, Uncle Bobby,’ she carolled as he was about to step off, ‘Do come and see my little baby.’

  He balked, then very reluctantly he approached, though no closer than was absolutely necessary. Stopping well short of the pram, he leaned forward a little to examine what was inside and his handsome features contorted into an expression of the utmost revulsion as he looked at me. ‘Ugh!’ he exclaimed in a shudder of intense disgust, then turned and walked away.

  2

  Arisaig

  ‘If you know how to hunt with a rifle, ski well and climb an overhanging rock face you’ll be all right whatever happens to you in life,’ Father told me. He said it with conviction and, aged seven, I did not question the proposition’s truth. Skiing was out for the moment as there was no snow, but he started me at once on the other two skills he considered essential to prepare a boy for the modern world. For we lived then in the ideal situation for him to teach me both – Arisaig – a tiny village in the west highlands of Scotland. At the start of the Second World War he’d been sent by the army to this remote spot as a commando instructor.

  The whole stretch of some 900 square miles of coast and wilderness had been taken over by the Special Operations Executive. To seal it off from the outside world was not difficult, only a single-track railway line and one very bad road led into the region; an official permit was necessary to enter it and the men who examined these permits, although in military uniform, were not soldiers but security agents and police detectives.

  Arisaig House, Inverailort Castle and the few other large isolated houses in the area were requisitioned as schools of mountain and guerrilla warfare, and used for training male and female agents. The SOE had come into being after the fall of France, in order to foster and support resistance groups in occupied territories. Its function was to supply agents skilled in the tactics of unorthodox warfare, including destruction by explosives, silent killing and unarmed combat. When their training was completed they were smuggled into occupied territories by parachute or submarine, equipped with the explosives and weaponry required to inflict maximum damage and disruption.