Vincennes epitomised the grubbier, grittier aspects of the racing scene and attracted huge crowds every Sunday, with many of North African and Middle Eastern aspect, and heavy emphasis on betting. The trotteurs who competed in harness races on a cinder track looked so completely different from the graceful thoroughbred beauties of Flat racing proper that they might have belonged to an alien species. Lean to the point of gauntness, long-legged and long-necked, with Frink-type big, plain heads, they appeared downright ugly in repose, their looks hardly enhanced by festoons of straps, hoods, blinkers and winkers, bandages and complicated devices to stop them breaking into a gallop.
In action, though, it was a different story. Pounding round the track with nostrils flaring and legs flailing, they became almost beautiful as they covered the ground with amazing speed, balancing their weight against that of the driver in his light, two-wheeled sulky. As the highly partisan crowd roared its favourites home, some of the finishes were thrilling, though like the Roman chariot-racing from which it derived, harness-racing was no stranger to questionable practices. I remember Clarissa and I were highly indignant when a gallant one-eyed trotter not much bigger than a pony put up a tremendous performance to beat the odds-on favourite driven by crafty Charlot Mills whose reputation was less than stainless, only to be relegated to second place purely, it seemed to us, to appease the fury of the crowd.
Going racing with Uncle Breynton was a very different affair. He believed in doing things in style, and chose for our first outing to Longchamps the first Sunday in October, the most glamorous date in the French racing calendar when the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe attracted – as it still does – the cream of the world’s middle-distance stars, colts and fillies three years old and upward, handicapped weight for age over the mile-and-a-half-long right-handed, horse-shoe-shaped course with its testing two-and-a-half furlong finishing straight.
We kicked off with a slap-up lunch in a restaurant popular with the racing in-crowd, Clarissa and me in our student best but outclassed in the fashion stakes by Uncle Giles’s wife Marianne, in full war-paint, very high heels, and a most desirable pale linen ensemble with a provocative plunging neckline, her wrists clanking with gold curb-chain bracelets, as she flirted impartially with her husband and brother-in-law, tall and distinguished in their tailcoats and grey toppers.
As we wiggled through the tight-packed tables, Uncle Breynton stopped here and there to greet friends. His own horses were with George Bridgland, one of several French trainers with English names, and he was well-known to the racing elite. Clarissa and I both finished the sumptuous lunch with flaming Crêpes Suzette and while I was surreptitiously easing undone the top button of my skirt I noticed some of the noisy table of Italians over by the window were looking round at us and calling, ‘Bertee! Bertee!’
For a time Uncle Breynton ignored them, but presently the waiter brought a note to our table and he excused himself to Marianne and went over to have a drink with the Italians.
‘Why do they call him Bertie?’ asked Clarissa, and I explained that when Daddy was looking for his brother-in-law during the campaign in Italy, he was told to follow the signs ‘To Bertram Mills’ Circus.’
‘Mario della Rochetta,’ said Uncle Breynton, coming back, ‘says his horse will win.’
‘But of course!’ Marianne laughed. ‘Zat is what zey all say!’
Uncle Giles produced a list of runners and riders. ‘Ribot,’ he said thoughtfully, folding it up again. ‘By Tenerani. Well, maybe…’.
And, a couple of hours later, Ribot it was, wiping the floor with the opposition in the most handsome style. He came flying up the brilliant green straight between the brilliant white rails without appearing to exert himself, leaving the rest of the pack struggling in his wake, and won the Arc by the then-record margin of six lengths while Clarissa and I shouted ourselves hoarse.
We had all backed him – quite heavily, I fancy, in Uncle Breynton’s case – and returned to 11 rue Joseph Bara with pockets bulging. It was a different story when he won again the following year, but I shall never forget the glory of that first triumph on a golden October day.
By the time the Cours de Civilisation ended in February, all four of us were suffering from claustrophobia in the crowded flat. Quarrels between us grew noisier and more frequent. Someone was always on non-speaks with someone else, and we seemed to break something and be scolded for it every single day. Outside the over-heated flat it was cold and bleak. Sitting about in cafés watching the world go by was no longer an option: you had to keep moving, so we resorted to desperate measures like walking the whole way from Montmartre to Montparnasse in a couple of hours, or taking the train out to the Bois de Boulogne to ride very old, iron-mouthed, stiff-legged horses down its long tree-lined avenues.
Mlle Roblin did her best to propel us in the direction of plays, museums, famous sights and beauty spots, but she never came with us and, culturally speaking, I have always had a low threshold of boredom. There are only so many times that one can drift about the Louvre or rubberneck at Versailles on a cold winter afternoon without really understanding what you are looking at or for. The real root of the trouble was that by then we were sick of one another’s company but unable to escape it.
Things improved briefly when Uncle Harold and Aunt Nancy came to spend a week with friends at the British Embassy. Nancy took me and Clarissa with her to a dress-show, and then for her fitting at Balmain where, while waiting for what seemed hours amid the acres of pale carpet and little gold chairs, I was so horrified by the toffee-nosed staff and clientele that I made an easily-kept vow to wear ready-made for the rest of my life.
Uncle Harold’s treat was far more appealing: a real blow-out of a dinner at The White Tower, where we ordered everything flambé from kidneys to our favourite Crêpes Suzette, and while we stuffed ourselves, he gave us a blow-by-blow account of how he had masterminded the King of the Hellenes’ escape when the Germans overran Greece in 1941.
Like David, Uncle Harold was a splendid raconteur and brought the scene vividly to life. The King’s reluctance to leave Greece, the difficulties of smuggling him aboard a caique and the dangerous voyage to Crete with German spotter planes swooping low overhead. Then followed the long rough climb along goat-tracks through the hills to a shepherd’s hut which offered safety for the night, the difficulty of persuading the monarch to get a move on without offending him, trying to stop the villagers they passed from spreading the message that they had a royal visitor, and seeking to communicate by primitive wireless with the ship that was coming from Egypt to rescue them, without giving away their exact position.
A rendezvous was at last arranged – but so many things could go wrong. The ship would stand in to a certain small bay as darkness fell, and launch a boat to take the King off only after giving and receiving an agreed signal. During the long march across the mountains, Uncle Harold and his party checked their maps again and again, agonising over whether they and the ship were heading for the same bay. Above all, could they make the RV in time, before the rising moon made the vessel an easy target?
Then – disaster! A couple of hours short of their destination, the King announced that he had left his medals behind in the shepherd’s hut. In vain Uncle Harold argued that they didn’t matter, and that delay would put all their lives at risk. The King dug his toes in. He didn’t want to leave his people and go into exile, but his capture would be a great propaganda coup for the Germans, which the British government wanted to prevent at all costs. Obstinate by nature and increasingly resentful of being hustled from pillar to post by foreigners, he seized on the loss of the medals as a delaying tactic, insisting that the orders they represented were, for him, inextricably bound up his notion of kingship and self-worth. Until they were recovered, he would not budge.
There was nothing for it but to send someone back. The fittest, fastest runner volunteered to fetch them, and for over two hours, while the sun slipped lower and the distant sea darkened, the King sat on a
rock fifty yards from the rest of the party, smoking and brooding, refusing to go on even when it was put to him that the fleet-footed medal-bearer would catch them up before they reached the beach.
Spotter planes patrolled ceaselessly. The Greek royal family were by no means universally popular. Plenty of their disaffected subjects and communists lived in the mountains – so there was, besides, a constant danger that some goat-herd or woodsman would report their presence to the Germans, thereby making his fortune.
‘Short of knocking him out and carrying him aboard, there was nothing we could do,’ said Uncle Harold, grimacing at the memory, ‘and I don’t think his bodyguard and equerry would have stood for that.’
Darkness falls swiftly in the Mediterranean, and when the party, complete with medals, eventually stumbled and slipped down the steep path to the beach they could no longer see the walls of cliff that flanked the bay – so much longer and narrower than they expected that Uncle Harold began to worry whether any ship at its entrance would be able to see their answering signal.
For forty minutes they waited, straining their eyes into the blackness.
‘You begin to imagine you see lights on the sea, and then realise it’s just phosphorescence,’ he said. ‘I dared not use the torch until I was sure, because we hadn’t got a spare battery.’
At last they all saw three distant flashes, repeated ten seconds later, and Uncle Harold responded with his torch. Breathlessly they waited – five minutes, ten – but nothing happened. What had gone wrong?
Again the ship signalled. Again they responded with the same result.
‘They can’t see us,’ someone said.
The situation was now critical. It had been agreed that if three attempts at signalling got no answer, the ship could not risk staying any longer and would abort the mission. Uncle Harold told the tallest man in the party to wade out as far as he could with the torch, whose battery was fast failing, and try once more. Since their wader now had his back to the beach, the party could not see his flashed response when the ship made its final signal, but barely had he floundered back to dry land than they heard the low putter of an engine, and moments later a big rubber inflatable grounded gently on the pebbles…
Fourteen years later, Clarissa and I sighed with relief and looked with surprise at our empty plates. Immersed in Uncle Harold’s story, we had eaten every morsel of the best Crêpes Suzette Paris could offer, almost without tasting them.
Despite such moments of interest and pleasure the charms of Paris – never strong for me – had faded to vanishing point and I was longing to go home to Wales. Mummy was a wonderful correspondent, but each of her letters brought news of changes that worried me. As her enthusiasm for Welsh Black Cattle increased, she had begun to thin out the ponies – it was true there were far too many of them, but even so I wanted to have some influence on who was sold and who remained.
Gallant Micky had been pensioned off after an ill-fated paperchase when I urged him to a final burst of speed on sighting the ‘hare’ and felt a sickening lurch as a tendon in his hindleg snapped. I was too heavy, he was too old: the whole thing was a disaster. That had been two years earlier and now I couldn’t quarrel with the decision to put him down. Retirement didn’t suit him and he had begun to look poor and unkempt.
Other favourites had suffered various vicissitudes. Taffy had lost an eye, probably from a blackthorn, and though she still jumped boldly, she had to hold her head on one side and found it hard to judge her take-off. Rhwstyn, the jack-in-a-box pole-jumper, had been sold to a happy home with a neighbour, but had the misfortune to put a leg through a rotten plank on a bridge while out hunting and he, too, had to be put down. Dustyfoot, fat and cussed as ever, had been bought for my godfather’s children and was a great success with them – but then she broke into the shed where they kept chicken-feed and gorged all night with her nose in a sack until she foundered and died.
Ten or a dozen mountain pony mares and their foals had been sold en masse, but Mummy still found it difficult to come home with an empty trailer. As a result there were now several new full-size horses which I was keen to meet.
But over and above these considerations, I had a more compelling reason for wanting to hurry home. Now that my long and expensive education was complete, other excitements beckoned, the first of which was an arcane ritual known as ‘Doing the Season.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
London
EVEN BEFORE HOMOSEXUALS gave the phrase an entirely different meaning, telling friends that you were Coming Out often caused bemusement. Coming Out? Where from – prison? And when you tried to explain, there were other questions. Why? What for? What was the point? It was hard to answer without sounding like an irresponsible flibbertigibbet.
For the truth was that Coming Out was less about being presented to the glamorous new Queen (though that was its ostensible purpose) than going to parties and dances non-stop for several months on end, buying lots of new clothes, attending the highlights of the summer season – Ascot, Henley, Wimbledon and so on – and involving your parents in considerable trouble and expense. This laid you open to accusations of fiddling while Rome burned, and better girls than you prepared for Real Life by working their way through secretarial college or university. Plenty of my friends from school and elsewhere had turned down the chance of Doing the Season for the eminently sensible reason that they thought the time and money could be better spent.
But though on the surface Coming Out was difficult to defend, it did serve the useful purpose of extending a girl’s social network and giving her and her parents a chance to meet and take a good look at the kind of man she might eventually marry.
It was a kind of snowball. Having been introduced to the cream of the current crop of Debs’ Delights (as the carefully-vetted young men invited to house parties, cocktail parties and balls were known) and, by extension, to a wider circle of their friends, a girl was less likely to fall in love faute de mieux with the boy next door; and though some might claim that such a system was inherently restrictive, I would argue that a certain uniformity of background and outlook, shared interests and common aims gave these marriages a better chance of lasting than the modern matrimonial hunting-grounds of workplace or dating agency.
The ritual began early in the year with an application to the Lord Chamberlain’s office. Since Mummy herself had been presented at Court – splendidly attired in brocade, train, and feathers – in the reign of George V, and had subsequently managed to avoid any scandal, divorce, or criminal conviction which would have scuppered my chances, her application to present me to the Queen was approved and, while I was still in Paris, letters and postcards began to pour through the letterbox at Fforest Farm as long-ignored, long-forgotten friends came back on the radar. Hear you’ve a daughter coming out this year too… do let’s meet… such fun to see you again…
At the lunch party which followed, a dozen new acquaintances would swap names and addresses, add the names of well-behaved, well-connected young men of their acquaintance, if necessary adding the caveat NSIT (Not Safe In Taxis) or FI (Financially Insecure) to the semi-official List, and canvass suitable dates for parties and dances. These would be timed to avoid clashes as far as possible. After a month of giving and receiving these jolly lunches Mummy, whose high spirits and good looks made her seem years younger than her contemporaries, had an engagement book bulging with names and dates, and upon my return from France we slid gently into Stage Two of the ritual: Girls’ Tea Parties.
Now we debutantes got our first chance to meet and, like strange ponies sniffing noses, we squealed and rolled our eyes and clumped into groups with people we remembered from school, anxiously analysing other girls’ looks, dress sense, amiability, and degree of sophistication before tentatively becoming friends. Despite my year in France, I was painfully aware of my shortcomings in these areas, for besides being on the hefty side (all those crêpes) and naturally clumsy, I was uninterested in fashion and socially awkward. Short
sight may have played a part in this, because I had never seen an oculist or admitted that I needed specs and therefore found it difficult to recognise people, particularly if I encountered them out of their normal setting. There were lots of In jokes I didn’t understand, and I felt a country bumpkin when more trendy girls raved over actors and film stars, restaurants and nightclubs I had never heard of. Plainly there were adjustments to make and corners to knock off before I would feel one of the crowd.
It never occurred to me that other girls might find themselves equally out of their depth, and if Mummy hadn’t already put in so much spadework (and hadn’t been enjoying her return to social life so keenly) I might, in its early stages, have asked her to forget all about the Season and send me to secretarial college instead. But she had, and I didn’t, so I blundered on down the prescribed track towards the next stage, which involved cocktail parties and, inevitably, a major revamp of my wardrobe.
‘Some of these debutantes’ underclothes are grey,’ said the hoity-toity vendeuse at Debenham’s as I stripped in front of a cruelly-lit full-length mirror. ‘And most have heard of a slip,’ she added disdainfully.
I wasn’t wearing a petticoat, either, though my bra, pants, and suspender belt passed muster – just. But Mummy was more than equal to supercilious sales ladies, and gradually won her round as I obediently forced myself into a variety of day dresses, cocktail dresses, coats-and-skirts, and tight-bodiced, full-skirted ball gowns in taffeta, brocade, and chiffon. The final bill was staggering, but Mummy never flinched.
‘Hair next,’ she said. ‘I’ve made an appointment at Raymond.’
Mr Teasy-Weasy himself, a great, greasy maestro with luxuriant black curls like an Italian tenor, dragged his comb through my uninspiringly floppy light-brown hair and gave a resounding sniff. Until recently I had worn it in short plaits which I chewed in moments of stress, and then the hairdresser in Llandrindod had cut it in an uncompromising bob. Now Mr Teasy-Weasy decided to layer it.
My Animals (and Other Family) Page 23
