The Moon’s a Balloon

by David Niven

  He bought a poky little house in a back street behind Windsor Castle. It was a dark panelled purgatory, whose sole charm lay in the fact that it had once belonged to Nell Gwyn and much Royal thrashing around was said to have gone on in the four-poster upstairs. It poured with rain for the entire holiday and Grizel and I, wearing overcoats, played Mah-jongg in semi-darkness for three weeks. I hope I never again have to set eyes on the Bamboos, the Flowers, the Winds, the Seasons and all those miserable Dragons. I couldn’t wait to get back to Stowe.

  The memorable Easter holiday of this period came just after my fourteenth birthday.

  Tommy’s real estate operations found us, for a while, the inhabitants of 110 Sloane Street, a small house of many floors which shook as the buses went past the door: petroldriven red Metropolitan buses, numbers 19 and 22 and—far more fascinating to me because they were driven by steam—the white Nationals, N° 30.

  My brother, who had left the Navy because of chronic sea sickness and sensibly switched to the Army, was abroad with his regiment in India. Joyce and Grizel both had tiny bedrooms but there was no room for me-so I slept in a minute cubicle in a boarding-house in St. James’s Place, some distance away.

  Every night after dinner, I walked to Sloane Square, boarded a 19 or a 22 headed for Piccadilly, got off at the Ritz Hotel and proceeded down St. James’s Street to my iron bed, wooden floor, stained jug and basin and po under the bed.

  The next morning, I had to be back for breakfast at eight o’clock and I was given fourpence a day for the round trip. Even my rudimentary mathematics could work out that by walking four miles a day, I could save almost half a crown a week.

  I enjoyed my nocturnal travels very much and soon gave up going straight from Sloane Street to St. James’s Place and took to going all the way down Piccadilly to Piccadilly Circus to watch the electric signs.

  Every night, I became more adventurous and after a week or so, I knew the area bounded by Park Lane, Oxford Street, Regent Street and Pall Mall like the back of my hand. This was a pretty safe area for a fourteen-year-old, indeed, it never crossed my mind that it could be otherwise, and apart from being spoken to a few times by strange men who asked me if I would like to go home with them to meet their dogs or see their paintings, I tramped around unhindered.

  It seemed to me perfectly normal for a boy to be walking around the West End of London at night so I saw nothing out of the ordinary in the number of girls who were doing the same thing: cloche hats, flesh-coloured stockings and the forerunner of the mini-skirt being the vogue, I saw a vast amount of female legs and ankles twinkling their way up and down the same streets that I frequented.

  Bond Street was a great favourite of mine because many of the shops were lit up all night, and I made it a point, after watching BOVRIL, IRON JELLOIDS and OWBRIDGE’S LUNG TONIC change colours in Piccadilly Circus, to check on how things looked in the windows of Gerrards, Aspreys and Ciro Pearls.

  Some of the girls, I noticed, were walking every night on the same streets and I was soon on nodding terms with them though I didn’t understand at all the remarks made as I passed, nor the giggles that followed me.

  One night, in Bond Street, I noticed a really superior pair of legs in front of me and I became so fascinated by them that I followed them for quite a distance. The girl seemed to have many friends and stopped and spoke to them from time to time.

  The next night, I skipped going to watch the electric signs, and went looking for those legs instead. I searched up and down Bond Street and cased the side streets too, Clifford Street, Savile Row and even Burlington Street, the scene of my naval defeat.

  Just as I was about to give up, the girl came out of a house right in front of me and walked rapidly off towards Piccadilly. I followed and when she stopped on a corner to talk to a couple of lady friends, I crossed the street and pretended to look into a shop window. I managed to get a fairly good view of her face. She was laughing and talking…very lively, very gay, and her face looked beautiful in an open, fresh, English rose kind of way—blonde, blue eyes, high colour—you know the sort of thing. She stayed there talking to her friends and as I didn’t want to be conspicuous, I moved off towards my boarding house.

  When I woke up in the morning I knew I must be in love. At least, I suspected that I was because I could think of nothing else but this girl. The day dragged on interminably, a shopping morning with my mother and in the afternoon, playing among the stunted, grimy bushes of the gardens opposite our house with some stunted, grimy, Spanish children.

  That night, after dinner, I didn’t walk, I was in a hurry. I took the bus and was lucky. After cruising up and down for what seemed an age, my patience was rewarded and my heart gave a lurch as I saw her lovely, long legs approaching from the Piccadilly direction. She was with a distinguishedlooking, grey-haired man in a dinner jacket. He wore an opera hat and was smoking a cigar—obviously her father. Together they went into the house in Cork Street and, deliriously happy that I had found out where my dream lived, I took myself off to bed.

  It took three days or rather nights of patient toil and careful sleuthing before I finally met Nessie.

  I was following her at what I imagined to be a discreet distance, my eyes glued to her wondrous underpinnings, when she stopped and turned so suddenly and so unexpectedly, that I nearly bumped into her.

  ‘Wot the ‘ell are you followin’ me for?’ she demanded.

  I went purple.

  ‘I wasn’t following you,’ I lied. ‘I was just on my way to bed.’

  ‘Well, for Gawd’s sake go on ‘ome, mate. For the last four nights you’ve been stuck to me like my bleedin’ shadow. Wot d’yer want anyway?’ I stammered and looked wildly to right and left. Suddenly she softened and smiled.

  ‘All right, it’s still early and you’re a bit young but come on home and I’ll give yer a good time.’

  Soon she turned into her doorway and in a daze I followed, unable to believe my good fortune.

  ‘A good time’ she had said—it had to be at least a ginger beer and listening to the gramophone…Eileen Stanley singing ‘When it’s moonlight in Kaluha’ perhaps. In a high state of expectancy, I mounted to the second floor behind my glorious new friend.

  The flat, above a tailor’s shop, was small and smelled of cabbage. In the living-room there was a large divan with a lot of satin cushions and some dolls on it and nearby a small lamp With a red shade. A small kitchen stove was behind a screen. The other room was a bedroom, also rather poorly lit: a tiny bathroom was just discernible in the gloom beyond the huge bed that seemed to sag quite a lot in the middle.

  ‘Three quid,’ she said, as she took off her coat. A

  I didn’t quite get the message so she came very close to me and peered into my eyes.

  ‘Three quid,’ she repeated, ‘that too much?’ I gulped and floundered—‘For what?’

  ‘For the best yer’ve ever ‘ad, mate, but then you ‘aven’t’ad a lot ‘av yer? ‘Ow old are yer anyway?’

  I was still unsure as to exactly what ground I was on and I kept wondering if her father lived downstairs but I managed to mumble the truth. ‘Fourteen!!’ she practically shrieked. ‘Wot the ‘ell d’yer think I am—a bleeding’ nannie?’

  Then she started giggling, ‘Oh my Gawd, wot a larf. ‘Ow old d’yer think I am anyway?’

  ‘Twenty,’ I suggested tentatively.

  ‘Three years yet before that ‘appens,’ she said. ‘Well, come on, let’s get on wiv it, fourteen…Gawd, you are a one aren’t yer?’

  I watched half in fascination, half in apprehension as she walked about the living-room, taking off her little hat and blouse and unhooking her skirt. ‘ere, take a look at these in case you need any ‘elp.’ With that she sat me down on the divan and left me to look at a large album of photographs. ‘I’ll be ready in a jiffy, dear.’ She disappeared into the bedroom. I had not so far been exposed to any pornography so the contents of that album very nearly finished off my sex life before it got und
er way. Hideous over-weight ladies, clad only in shoes and stockings, being mounted from every angle by skinny little men with enormous ‘prongs’: combinations of every sort in threes and twos, all with expressions of the greatest sincerity—and all apparently in advanced middle age.

  The awful truth began to filter through my brain.

  When Nessie appeared in the bedroom door dressed in the same uniform as the buxom ladies in the album—naked except for black stockings, held above the knees by pink garters with blue roses on them and pink high-heeled shoes—she had a small towel in her hand.

  ‘Come along, ducks, let’s see ‘ow good you are…you can wash in ‘ere…I’ve put in permanganate,’ she added. In a daze, I followed here into the dark little bedroom…another red shaded lamp was beside the bed…’over there, dear,’ she said, indicating a kidney shaped enamel bowl on a collapsible knee-high stand. She threw me the towel, lay on the bed and put a record on a portable gramophone. The tune has, rather naturally, haunted me ever since. ‘Yes…we have no bananas.’ As I was to discover later, Nessie had a wonderful native wit but I still believe her selection at that particular moment was a random one.

  ‘Get a move on, ducks, you don’t get all night for three quid, yet know. Get your shirt off for a start.’

  I took off my coat and my shirt and started to wash my hands in the bowl. ‘Christ!’ she yelled, sitting bolt upright, ‘not your bleedin’

  ‘ands yet dickie bird! Just a minute,’ she went on more gently, ‘come ‘ere, come and sit on me bed, I want to talk to you…Now look me in the eye, straight…is this the first…lave yet ever done it before?…ever done any fuckin’?’

  Miserably, I shook my head.

  ‘And you ‘aven’t got three quid either I’ll bet?’

  Again I shook my head and mumbled some inane explanation.

  ‘Aw you poor little bastard,’ she said, ‘you must be scared out of yet fuckin’ wits:’ She looked at me reflectively, ‘Ever seen a naked woman before?’

  ‘No,’ I confessed. ’

  ‘Well, this is wot it looks like—‘ow d’yer like it?’ I smiled weakly and tried not to lower my eyes. Nessie snuggled down and started to giggle again, a deliciously infectious sound.

  ‘Well, you’ve got this far—why don’t you take the rest of your clobber off and pop into bed?’

  ‘What about the…’ I began.

  ‘Oh, you owe me three quid,’ she interrupted. ‘Christ, I never thought I’d be seducing children…FOURTEEN…come on, jump in then.’

  ‘Yes…we have no bananas’ was substituted for something a little more encouraging—the bedside lamp with the red shade was left on and Nessie with her Wondrous skin became a most understanding teacher. ‘There we are, dear, that’s it now—take a little weight on your elbows like a gentleman. Slowly, dear, more slowly—whoa! yet not a fuckin’ woodpecker, yet know…slowly…that’s it, enjoy yerself…there, that’s nice isn’t it, dear…are yer ‘appy?…’appy now?’

  By the time the Easter holidays ended, Nessie had become the most important thing in my life: my education at her hands, and in a way at her expense, had continued. She ‘worked’ at night and slept late but on many afternoons we met, usually at the entrance to a small movie house—she loved W.S. Hart—or we went to the music halls, the Coliseum, the Alhambra or the Palladium, to see Herbert Mundin, Lily Morris, Rebla, the juggler, or a marvellous pair of young acrobats—Nervo and Knox. The seats cost one shilling and threepence and after the shows we had a cup of tea and a bun in a little tea shop, or we skipped the tea and the bun and went directly back to her flat. Afterwards, I would walk down to Sloaqe Street for a dreary family dinner during which Tommy would rattle those damn cuff-links in his starched shirt to draw attention to the fact that I had my elbows on the table.

  Quite early in my relationship with Nessie, I made the elementary mistake of asking her why she did it…’a sweet girl like you’. She rounded on me like a tigress: ‘Now don’t you start trying to reform me. About three times a week some silly bugger asks the same friggin’ question.’

  ‘Look, I’m three years older than you and I’m doing it because I want to do it…why I want to do it is none of your fuckin’ bizness so if you don’t like it—piss off back to school.’

  Back at school for the summer term, I found that my life had changed fundamentally. Nessie or the thoughts of Nessie became the focal point of my existence. What I saw in her was fairly obvious but there were other things too; quite apart from the normal and very special physical attachment to ‘the first’, she gave me something that so far had been in rather short supply—call it love, understanding, warmth, female companionship or just ‘ingredient X’—whatever it was, it was all over me like a tent.

  I can’t believe that I contributed very much to Nessie’s well-being or peace of mind during this period—a fat fourteen and a half with no money and less experience—but apart from the ‘hurly burly of the chaise longue’, as Mrs. Patrick Campbell once described a splendid activity, there also grew up between us a brother-sister relationship that was to last for many years. Thanks to Nessie’s insistence, I lost weight, a lot of extra padding turned to muscle and I became quite a proficient athlete of the second rank…house colours for practically everything and a frequent performer before I left Stowe in the 1st XI cricket, the 1st XV Rugby Football and in the fencing and boxing teams.

  Nessie came down to Stowe to see me in summer and brought a picnic basket and a tartan rug. Together we took full advantage of the beauties of the school grounds. She had never been out of London before and these trips to the country, she told me later, gave her a peace she never knew existed. She took a great interest in my progress at the school and became so intrigued by my hero worship of Roxburgh, that she insisted on meeting him. Basely, I tried to avoid this confrontation but Nessie was not easily put of.

  ‘Look, dear, ‘e’ll never know I’m an ‘ore. ‘E’ll think I’m yer bleedin’ aunt or gomefing…Do I look like an ‘ore?’

  I told her she looked beautiful and like a duchess—not that looking like a duchess was much of a compliment but she was as easily flattered as she was hard to dissuade.

  ‘That’s ‘im, innit?’ she cried one Saturday afternoon, looking across towards the cricket pavilion. Roxburgh was approaching our tartan rug, resplendent in a pale grey suit topped by the inevitable spotted bow tie. Nessie stood up, bathed in sunlight. She was wearmg a short white silk summer dress that clung lovingly to her beautiful body; her honey coloured hair was cut in the fashion of the time—the shingle; she had a small upturned nose; she looked wonderfully young and fresh.

  Roxburgh came over smiling his famous smile, ‘May I join you?’

  I introduced him.

  ‘e’s just like you told me,’ said Nessie in a stage whisper.

  ‘e’s beautiful,’ and then to Roxburgh. ‘Don’t look a bit like a schoolmaster dew yew, dear?’

  J.F. settling himself on the rug missed a tiny beat but thereafter never gave any indication that he was not talking to a beautiful duchess. He stayed about ten minutes, extolling the glories of Stowe House and its history, and Nessie bathed in the full glow of his charm. Never once did he ask any loaded questions and when he got up to leave, he said, ‘David is very lucky to have such a charming visitor.’ The charming visitor nearly got me expelled a year later but it was certainly not her fault.

  In the summer of 1926, by now a robust sixteen-year-old and appreciably ahead of my time in worldly experience, Roxburgh must have sensed a change in me. He sent for me and told me that I was one of four boys he had selected to become ‘monitors’ in a new house—Grafton, which was to open the following term.

  The housemaster was coming from Fettes, Mr. Freeman, and the boy chosen as prefect or head of the house was Bernard Gadney.↓

  ≡ B.C. Gadney was later to captain the English XV in many Rugby Internationals.

  It was a huge compliment for any-boy, but for me to feel that J.F. had this faith in
me was an enormous boost. However, before I could bask in the glories of my new responsibilities. I had to overcome a slight hazard—the School Certificate. I was to sit for the exam in two weeks’ time. It was a sort of long shot really…if I failed this time, I would still have three more chances but I had to obtain the certificate soon in order to qualify to sit for the entrance exam to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, eighteen months hence.

  Apart from the dreaded mathematics, I was quite confident that—I could pull it off this first time. My prospects in the new house were very exciting, my fat had disappeared, I had many friends at school and at Bembridge, I had Nessie in the background and I was at last beginning to get to know and to love my mother. In fact, everything was ‘roses’ for me. Then that damn wind started puffing those weeds in my direction once more. I sat for the exam in the big school gymnasium and made mincemeat of the first two papers, French and history, and after the science, geography and English papers, I remained supremely confident. The last two tests were mathematics and Latin translation. In mathematics, as already explained, a ‘credit’ (about 80 per cent) was obligatory; without it, I would fail in the whole exam. When the questions were put on my desk, and all over the country at that particular moment identical papers were being put in front of thousands of nervous boys, I took a deep breath and started to read.

  One glance was enough. It was hopeless. I knew that I just couldn’t cope and there is no more suffocating feeling when sitting for a public examination.

  I made a few vague stabs at the geometry questions and a token effort at the algebra but there was no point in my even trying to tackle the arithmetic.

  I was the first boy to hand in his answers and leave the gymnasium. I went out to the cricket nets and faced the fact that the School Certificate was certainly not going to be mine this time.