Fast and Louche

by Jeremy Scott

  In the summer of 1943, exactly eleven years earlier, Hamburg had been bombed by the British and American air forces for nine days and nights continuously. The heat of the phosphorous bombs created firestorms which drove rivers of flame through the streets, incinerating everything in their path. A million people were made homeless, 85,000 burned to death. Many, running from the inferno with their clothes in flames, flung themselves in the Alster and were drowned.

  Now Rodney slumped drunkenly by this same lake, shooting duck with my revolver. We were the occupying power. The Germans we met were hard-working, subservient, eager to please; not for another fifteen years would they not us, prove to have won the war. Among themselves they called us ‘the Barbarians.’

  Eagerly engaged in discovering life, I never thought of death; the idea of it never entered my head. Yet before my army service ended, death would pass by me twice.

  The culmination of a summer’s training in simulated battle manoeuvres was the week-long NATO exercise in which the US and British armies combined with French and Belgian forces to resist a make-believe Soviet advance into West Germany. At midnight, three days into the manoeuvres, my troop of armoured cars was driving down a sandy track through a pine forest somewhere on the Luneburger plain. The cars were widely spaced, with seventy or a hundred yards between them to make the troop less vulnerable to ambush. None of us had slept since the start of the exercise. To deprive men of sleep was a deliberate policy, the quickest way to show up those who’d become unreliable in battle conditions, and we had been kept moving continually. In the open turret of the second car I was in that state beyond exhaustion when events have the illusive detachment of a dream. A strong wind was blowing, dragging a tattered wrack of cloud across the moon and rushing through the branches of the pine trees beside the track ahead, which was illuminated dimly by our masked headlights.

  A call came through from the leading car, crackling in my handset. ‘Motor cyclist. Just passing me.’ I saw his light a few seconds later, jiggling unsteadily on the uneven track. It drew closer and my driver pulled over to let the bike pass, but he was as sleep-deprived and bone-weary as the rest of us. The car’s tyres were set in deep ruts, and he didn’t turn the wheel of the heavy vehicle with sufficient force to haul it free.

  The motor cyclist did not see our masked lights until it was too late. At the inquest it was established that he’d passed the evening drinking in a bierkeller. His own wheels were set in one of the ruts and he collided head-on with our off-side wing. For the last ten yards I watched him coming in the slowed inevitability of a nightmare, then his bike hit the car. His body flew up in the air in an untidy black bundle, somersaulting straight at me. His head struck the turret just below where my hand was gripping it. The unprotected skull cracked open, the body whirled past into the dark. The armour plating was spattered with his brains – as was my sleeve. The wind was shrieking through the pine trees and torn clouds scudded across the moon.

  The sense of overwhelming horror recurred for days afterwards. I would be functioning perfectly, then suddenly the ground would open at my feet and I’d be staring into the abyss, dazed and sick with dread.

  My second glimpse of death came soon after. In the week following the NATO exercise there was a regimental mess night. When dinner was over Birbeck and I set off to gamble at Travemunde. We drove in his Jaguar, a new car he’d brought from England which, typically, he had not bothered to run in but caned from the start, indifferent to the damage he was doing to the motor.

  Reaching Travemunde before midnight, we played roulette in the casino. Birbeck at first won, then lost heavily, buying more chips and scattering them recklessly over the table. When we came to leave, the drink had soured in his belly and he was in bad humour. He asked me to drive.

  An hour later and south of Hamburg dawn leaked into the sky – that light the French call entre chien et loup – as I gunned the car down a straight empty road bounded on both sides by the pine forest. I could see almost a mile ahead and was holding the Jaguar in the middle of the road with the accelerator flat to the floor.

  In the shadowless light I didn’t see the humped bridge at the bottom of a long downward slope, didn’t have time to brake. The shocks gave an enormous bang as the big car bottomed in the dip, came up the hump and took off. As we flew from the hump I saw a silver Mercedes thirty yards ahead.

  We struck head on. I have no recall of the impact … I was in Arisaig on the heather-covered hill above a ruined chapel, looking out over the bay. The world was silent, absolutely still, and the air vibrated with colour and with light. Dreamlike and shining, this was a place I knew yet did not know, for it had never been like this. I was suspended in peace, and I knew that I was dead.

  Then suddenly all was changed and above me I saw the interlaced branches of a tree, beyond them a sky clearing into blue. ‘Fucking hell!’ I heard a voice swear. Birbeck lay on the mossy ground ten yards away, his big body half in and half out of the twisted wreckage of the Jaguar which was wrapped round a tree. We were both wearing dress uniform and one of his spurred boots had been trapped in the shambles. As I helped to free his foot the driver of the Mercedes came stumbling out of the forest, white faced as a ghost.

  In the collision the two cars had met at an impact speed of about 150 mph. Both were mangled beyond recognition, crumpled wrecks. As if he’d been in an ejector seat, the German had been shot out through his blessedly open sunshine roof. The doors of the Jaguar had burst open as it rolled, Birbeck and myself thrown clear. He and the German were unharmed, I had a gash on my head requiring three stitches.

  I never recovered memory of the crash. But it shook me, for I did not understand how we had survived. For a short while it changed me until, in the way of youth, the lesson become submerged in the eager activity of living.

  9

  Gilston Road

  Completing two years’ military service I returned to London to embark upon a glittering civilian career – in what, I had no idea.

  At Gilston Road the household cast had changed since I’d last been there. Mrs Reeves, our cook, whose legs were so bad she’d been unable to climb the stairs from the basement for years, had finally retired. And Mother had given birth to another son. I’d learned of the event only after it had occurred from a casual reference in one of her rare letters. This was, I think, a last attempt to save her marriage and, as such, misconceived. Hamish had a nursery at the top of the house and was looked after by Nanny. When I went by his pram in the garden I said hello, but unsurprisingly we were not close. Nor was I to my other brother David, for five years is a vast age difference in childhood and we had little in common. He was away at school, Fettes, when I arrived home from the army.

  Father occupied a room on the ground floor of the house. By now he had published six books – none of them successful except the first, his biography of Gino, and was still following the same routine of sleeping on the sofa in his study, walking to the Daily Telegraph wearing a rucksack, returning by foot at 8.30 pm for supper, then retiring to write. And Mother’s domain consisted of the master bedroom on the first floor and the drawing room.

  She was always busy. She looked after Hamish while Nanny did the food shopping, and again at tea time; she went to art exhibitions and galleries; sometimes she painted water-colours at an easel in her bedroom; she read a lot. She was a member of Harrods’ library and the store was also her bank. Once or twice a week she’d go there to change books or cash a small cheque. She went by number 14 bus, always getting off at Brompton Oratory, the preceding stop, and walking the rest of the way because that was a ‘stage’ and saved one penny on the fare.

  She still bravely attempted to give dinner parties for her friends and relatives. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she told Father. ‘One bottle of wine is quite enough for six people. There’s one open from last time at the back of the drinks cupboard.’

  On these evenings the table was laid with the good silver she’d inherited, and candles set out on its po
lished surface. She prepared and cooked the main dish herself. There was never enough and the portions were niggardly. ‘I got the best off-cuts I could with the money,’ Nanny would explain defensively. ‘And the butcher said they were good.’

  Despite the wretched food and lack of alcohol, sometimes these parties began rather well, for a number of Mother’s friends were charming and entertaining people, and she herself could be very witty. But Father had perfected a way of ruining them. On one such evening he returned particularly late from the newspaper. The party had already moved into the dining room and started on the meal, served by Nanny in her best apron which she’d had to pay for herself.

  Dumping his mountaineering rucksack in the hall, Father entered the dining room with a set face, dressed in the baggy tweed jacket and flannels he always wore. With a curt nod to the guests at table, he strode to the sideboard where the main course simmered in a chafing dish. Raising the lid, he peered inside. His face wrinkled with distaste, he let out an angry grunt. Marching to the kitchen, he returned with the wooden breadboard, a slab of margarine still in its wrapping and a pot of jam. Banging these down on the table as dinner conversation withered into silence around him, he cut himself a thick slice, spread it with jam and began to eat.

  Usually Mother chose evenings when he was away to entertain. He was out of England often during the time I served in Germany. At the Telegraph he was their Arctic, mountaineering and wine correspondent and book reviewer, as well as handling the paper’s public relations – a strange job for a man who detested people so much as he did. As their travel correspondent he made a number of walks, one of these from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean above the France–Spain frontier. Ignoring roads, he followed a high mountain route, sleeping out each night beneath a tree; next morning he would leave a coin at the foot of the tree to pay for his lodging. On two occasions he was shot at by border guards, he believed he had a natural right to cross international frontiers wherever he chose.

  ‘When the east wind’s blowing it’s cold as charity here, I do declare,’ said Nanny.

  I was sleeping in my old room on the top floor and the building was in conspicuously worse condition than when I’d last lived there. Nothing planned had been done, and the bomb damage dating from the war had never been fixed. The roof had needed replacing when Mother had bought the house, now the full blast of winter could not be kept out without constant running repairs.

  Mother would accept only the lowest quote, and that with great reluctance. A series of cack-handed cowboy workmen had botched their way through the years until she’d found Mr Baines – ‘an absolute treasure, darling’. Smaller and cheaper and more incompetent than any before, he was chronically depressed; ‘trouble at home’ he confided to Nanny. One day he was out on the roof, hanging there precariously as he attempted to force in a new slate, while Mother watched anxiously from the garden below. There was no possibility of either of them being insured. ‘Oh, Mr Baines I do hope you’re not going to fall off,’ Mother carolled from the ground.

  ‘Quite honestly, Mrs Scott, I don’t mind if I do,’ Mr Baines shouted back.

  It was a cold house that winter. There was only a single radiator in the hall to heat the entire building, but this didn’t work, and though some rooms had antique gas fires, their heating elements were no longer manufactured. Nanny passed her weekly afternoon off scouring hardware stores in Battersea for any of the honeycomb china fittings that remained in stock. The temperature sank further whenever Father returned to roost. While at home he questioned me closely on what efforts I was making to find work and had already come up with several unwelcome suggestions.

  I had lunch with Alex one day to ask him how he was progressing in the search for a job. We met in Salamis in the Fulham Road, where you could eat for two shillings and sixpence (12½p), and he appeared in the most extraordinary double-breasted jacket with twin rows of large, very shiny brass buttons. Built with unpadded sloping shoulders, it resembled nothing anyone else was wearing at the time.

  ‘That’s a striking blazer,’ I remarked, rather lost for what to say.

  ‘It’s not a blazer, it’s a boating jacket,’ he rebuked me. ‘Made for my grandfather.’

  He also had on a beret, which he wore throughout the meal. ‘Seventy per cent of the body’s energy escapes via the head,’ he explained. Nigel, with whom he shared a flat in Cadogan Square, had warned me he was behaving oddly and had started sleeping on the floorboards of his room rather than the bed. We’d decided this was because he’d done a course in parachuting and special training, but we wondered what he was toughening himself up for.

  Over lunch I confessed my disturbing lack of success in finding work. The single job I’d been offered was as a trainee copywriter at Masius – but only if I first spent six months as a shop assistant in Selfridges ‘to learn selling’.

  ‘What a preposterous idea!’ he said. ‘Actually, I’m thinking of going into advertising myself, but only in an executive capacity, of course. Our qualification is we know how to lead men.’

  ‘Er, yes,’ I agreed, remarking that quite a lot of people in advertising seemed to be women. But Alex said that was all right, we knew how to lead women too.

  ‘How many interviews have you gone to?’ I asked him.

  ‘Don’t be depressing,’ he told me tartly. ‘I have excellent connections and that’s what counts. Some of them will be there tonight, Mother’s throwing a party. You can come, if you want,’ he added.

  I arrived late at Margot Howard’s party – I’d already discovered it’s better to turn up when the revel is already warmed – and I came bearing a bottle of gin. The living room of the house was packed with people and thick with cigarette smoke. Alex said something when he greeted me, but the noise was so overwhelming, I had to ask him to repeat it.

  ‘I said Dylan Thomas is here,’ he told me.

  I was thrilled. ‘Where? Can I meet him?’ I asked.

  ‘Later,’ he promised, introducing me instead to a stocky man whose scruffy suit was sprinkled with cigarette ash. ‘John Davenport – literary critic, Sunday Times,’ Alex explained, and alertly I made ready to discuss Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, but before I could Davenport muttered in a slurred voice, ‘Better pour some of that gin before you put it on the bar, once there it’s done for.’

  I was used to drunkenness in my peer group but I’d seldom seen older people drunk, and never en masse like this. I found the sight vaguely alarming and circulated uneasily for a while. It was a relief to come up against Alex’s father Rex, who appeared reassuringly sober and well-dressed. ‘I think my cousin may be in the same line of business as yourself,’ I remarked as a conversational opener.

  His reaction was stony. Rex’s Whitehall office was purportedly something to do with Resource Management; was I supposed not to be aware he was in Intelligence? ‘Graham Eyres-Monsell, I wonder if you know him?’ I continued.

  He gave me a long appraising look. He didn’t say anything, and his silence was disconcerting. ‘Mother insists he’s a Soviet spy,’ I gibbered on recklessly. ‘Do you think that could be so?’

  Rex kept on looking at me in heavy silence. A nerve twitched beside his eye. ‘And what do you think?’ he asked at last.

  I believed it quite likely. Graham’s father, Uncle Bobby, had done so much to advance the Nazi cause during the war Graham probably saw betraying Britain as a family tradition. But I realised it would be a mistake to say as much to Rex who was glaring at me furiously. I realised I’d upset him.

  Then came deliverance. I saw a plump figure in a fisherman’s jersey emerge from the scrum behind Rex and stumble toward us … and my heart leapt as in that ruined face of a sottish cherub I recognised the poet whose verse had so moved me at school. ‘Isn’t that …?’ I asked excitedly as he lurched closer, and I saw his puffy cheeks were pale and slick with sweat.

  ‘Ah, Dylan, my dear fellow,’ Rex exclaimed, turning from me with relief.

  The poet halted, starin
g at us glassily. He belched, and a bubble of froth ballooned in his full loose mouth. Then, quite slowly and almost gracefully, he swayed forward and threw up.

  ‘I say, steady on, old chap. Better in the garden donch’ya know,’ Rex said mildly and, taking him by the arm in friendly solicitude, he steered my idol to the door.

  Disillusioned and soiled, I was left staring at my shoes, splattered with Welsh vomit.

  10

  Connecticut

  Three months after rinsing Dylan Thomas off my shoes I found myself on board the SS United States – the fastest and most modern of transatlantic liners – as she moved slowly away from the quay into Southampton Water at the start of her voyage to New York. I was on my way to take up a rather intriguing offer of employment.

  This had come about through Brownie Were, mother of Shirley, one of the girls Nigel and I had taken to Biarritz two years earlier. Brownie’s husband, Cecil, had retired from his post as consul general in Basel and the couple lived with their three children in a house in South Kensington. Cecil Were was twenty-seven years older than his wife, whom he’d married in Alexandria when she was seventeen. She’d married Cecil for a security she had never known – and had paid a price for it. ‘My wife is uneducated and I’m not sure she isn’t drunk,’ he said to me at a dinner party. Cecil was self-important and pedantic; she was vivid, witty and very attractive. Very soon after their marriage she started to take lovers, the latest Christoph Veiel, son of the president of Roche International, in Basel.