Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  On the subject of battered ornaments, the school magazine reminds me that in 1952, weighing in at seven stone, seven pounds, I actually won the junior school boxing competition. To all those who know my gentle ways, this may come as a surprise, but I can only say that my father was responsible. He was born and brought up in Leeds, but sadly I have only a few memories of my paternal grandparents – my Orthodox Russian grandfather Max, with his black rabbinical beard, and my kindly and good-looking Polish-German grandmother Emilia, who, when she was not washing clothes and wringing them out through a wooden contraption in the kitchen, would rattle off Chopin polonaises on an old upright in the dusty sitting room. I stayed with them occasionally when very young in their old rambling house in Chapeltown, and loved to turn the handle of that wringer, pretending I was driving one of the trams that crisscrossed Leeds at that time. My grandfather had a rather imposing shop in town which specialised in repairing and selling watches and jewellery, and in all the photos I have of him he is formally dressed in a wing collar. He was, by all accounts, for all his Orthodoxy, a flamboyant character, having one of the first cars in Leeds and at one time buying an aeroplane and an extremely large house – and not just any large house, but Potternewton Hall, an eighteenth-century manor house with thirteen acres of land, where the Duchess of Cambridge’s great-grandmother was born and grew up. However, it seems that his wife refused to live there, and he sold it a year later, apparently at a loss. For all the distance in time, I can distinctly recall the morning he descended the long, winding staircase of his Chapeltown house and startled me by raising his hands above my head and, in a scene out of the Bible, solemnly blessing me with Hebrew words I did not then understand. Was I Esau or was I Jacob, the pretender? I wonder.

  My paternal grandfather in the doorway of his shop in Leeds – quite an adventurer, despite his religious orthodoxy.

  It was in Leeds that my father experienced anti-Semitism at first hand, not only in the streets, where it was rampant, but later at medical school, where one day the consultant announced to the students around him, while looking at my father, ‘I don’t like foreigners on my wards.’ The same consultant later told my father that as long as he had anything to do with it my dad would never qualify, so he took off for London and sat his finals there. Before that, though, he’d learned to box, sparring from time to time with Harry Mason, who was also brought up in Leeds and became the British welter- and lightweight champion. I must add here, as a tailpiece to this story, that my father’s younger brother Leo (father of my cousin, the knowledgeable and extremely witty journalist David Robson) had similar experiences at the same hospital. A brilliant surgeon, Leo was in line to succeed the then consultant when the latter retired, but he was bypassed. Disillusioned, Leo, the mildest and most easy-going of men, gave up medicine, moved to Harrogate and took up dentistry.

  Because of his experiences, my father felt it important that I should learn to defend myself, so I joined the boxing club at General Motors, around the corner from where we lived in Colindale, and where he was the medical officer, and I continued to box at school. It stood me in good stead when I found myself fighting the class bully in the semi-finals of the school championship. It was a ferocious fight and to my amazement I was given the verdict – perhaps because he was a rather hit-and-miss fighter (who luckily missed more than he hit), and I’d learned to box in a more orthodox way, jabbing and moving and counter-punching. Afterwards that boy gave me a wide berth, so my dad definitely had a point. I gave up boxing after a year or two when I realised the boys we fought from nearby schools were becoming dangerously large!

  Apart from the girls in the school revue (and one or two others), tennis was a major distraction in my senior school years, and the only thing I really excelled at, captaining the team. For some reason tennis was considered a sissy game by certain masters and I often wondered how they would fare over five sets on the Centre Court. There’s no doubt that far too much of my time was spent on the tennis court when I should have been studying. Once again my father, a keen but very average tennis player, was partly responsible, taking me to tournaments whenever possible. At that time you didn’t have to fight or queue all night for tickets for Wimbledon, Queen’s Club, or the other main tournaments in order to see the leading players, as many of them would play at local tournaments where you could get in easily and often find yourself brushing shoulders with them as they strolled, unchaperoned, to whichever court they were scheduled to play on next. Those were the days when our top-ranked player, Bobby Wilson, who was just four years older than me and whom I’d watched in awe in the Junior Middlesex Championships, would travel to Wimbledon by bus with his wooden rackets and his mother, gallantly reaching the quarter-finals four times as the nation held its breath. One memorable year we hit gold when my father, who had evolved an effective way of treating tennis elbow, was called in on the eve of Wimbledon to treat the world’s leading women’s player, the big-serving American Louise Brough, who had hurt her elbow. Brough won Wimbledon four times (three in succession in 1948, ’49 and ’50) and so the press were all over my dad as he set to work, successfully treating her at our local club – which meant there was no shortage of Wimbledon tickets for us that year!

  Haberdashers’ tennis team, 1956. The very tall Michael Rivkin, our original backer, is directly behind me. I was the captain in those days!

  I hadn’t realised just how deeply those early tennis years had entered my psyche until very recently, when I was given two Wimbledon programmes from the early ’50s. Remarkably, the competitors then were all amateurs, yet those names, sprinkled through the gentlemen’s singles draw, were like royalty to me, though many are hardly remembered now except perhaps by devotees of my generation – players like Victor Seixas, Ted Schroeder, John Bromwich, Gardnar Mulloy, Pancho Gonzalez (my idol, whose matches against the small, fiery, bandy-legged Pancho Segura were among the most marvellous I’ve been privileged to watch), Frank Sedgman and the film-star-handsome Budge Patty, who, in the days before tie-breaks, played what was then the longest match in the history of Wimbledon, losing 6–8, 18–16, 6–3, 6–8, 10–12 to Jaroslav Drobný, with me courtside, savouring every stroke, every rally. And that was just the men. In the ladies’ singles, Louise Brough, Margaret duPont, Doris Hart, Shirley Fry and Maureen Connolly (‘Little Mo’) topped the list, and while those early programmes devoted several pages to photos of the men, there is not a single photo of a woman – despite (or perhaps because of) the appearance a few years earlier of ‘Gorgeous’ Gussie Moran, who raised establishment eyebrows with her (relatively) short skirt and her frilly lace knickers. And I had the luck to be courtside once again when she made her startling first appearance!

  No doubt fired by all this, every Sunday morning I’d set off early to play with my close friend Anthony Stalbow, who was fortunate enough to have a court in the gardens of his parents’ flat in Highgate. We’d first met at our local club when we were thirteen, playing in an American tournament. This was mixed doubles and you drew for your partner, sticking with him or her throughout as you played a set against all the other pairs in turn. When our turn came to play against each other, and no doubt wanting to impress, Tony and I pulled out all the stops, ungallantly ‘poaching’ too many shots from our not-altogether-brilliant (not even glamorous) partners. Luckily, Tony’s vivacious Israeli mother, who was glamorous, was watching and she invited me to come and play on their court with my erstwhile opponent. So started our great friendship, which continues to this day. We were kindred spirits, and both of us were to win junior tournaments and play for the Middlesex under-18 team. And both of us were so shy that whenever the rather attractive girl whose family also lived in the apartments appeared in the garden with some friends, we would creep stealthily away to avoid an encounter. How we ever managed to get ourselves girlfriends at that stage of our lives is a wonder, but somehow we did. And how heart-churning those early amours were!

  It always seemed like love,

  but who
can say?

  How innocent those days,

  the fumblings behind that

  broken fence, the constant fray.

  Tony Stalbow and I were privileged to have a series of lessons with Don Tregonning, a young member of the Australian squad who went on to coach the Danish national team, including Kurt Nielsen, a future Wimbledon finalist. He taught us to start our backhand swing low down and to come up through the ball – none of the wrist bending of today. And he and his Wimbledon partner Peter Cawthorn would hit bullets at us as we stood at the net trying to parry them. As well as free Slazenger rackets, I was also given free tennis coaching by the county and had a series of lessons on the Green Park public courts from Frank Wilde, twice a Wimbledon doubles finalist in the late 1930s. I was surprised to read in the notebooks of that fine writer Frederic Raphael that he too had taken lessons with Wilde – something we talked about fifty or more years later when I came to publish some of Freddie’s novels and his Cambridge memoir, Going Up.

  When we were in our fifties, Tony and I came together again on court to win the Veteran Doubles title at the same club where we’d met umpteen years earlier, and where we’d won the junior tournament in successive years. The cup we were now presented with was ambiguously inscribed ‘VD Champions’. When I tried to impress my teenage daughters, pointing to our names newly engraved on the clubhouse board, the only comment I got was, ‘How pathetic!’

  Sic transit gloria mundi.

  2

  A LAW UNTO ITSELF

  In his cordial letter to me from Faber, gently edging me away from thoughts of a publishing career, Morley Kennerley had gone on to remind me that T. S. Eliot had written his finest poems while working in a bank. Whatever the uncertainties in my young life at that time, of one thing I was sure: a banking career was not for me. Instead, without much thought I found myself hurtling like a lemming in the direction of the law, becoming articled to B. A. Woolf and Co., a small but dynamic firm with offices in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, just around the corner from the Law Courts in the Strand. The rather Dickensian offices consisted of just two large rooms, with old files spilling out of cabinets and piled up along the walls. One room, overlooking the square, was occupied by the firm’s principal, David Lewis; the other by two young solicitors, Michael Roscoe and Raphael Teff, a managing clerk, Mr Fields, a super-efficient typist/secretary – and me, perched behind a tiny desk facing the window at the back of the room and trying to make myself invisible.

  Small the company might have been, but there was nothing small about David Lewis, whether in stature, personality, reputation or intellect. A sometimes excitable man who didn’t suffer fools gladly, he always seemed to be a step ahead of everyone else. No wonder he had a number of high-flying clients who relied on his agile mind and obvious erudition. David Lewis kept his sharp eyes on everything, and when the morning post arrived, the two young solicitors would traipse into his office with me in tow. There we would stand in front of his huge desk while he went through and discussed any letters or documents relating to matters one or other of them was handling, questioning them carefully and making suggestions as to how best to proceed. Since I wasn’t directly in the firing line, I would find these morning sessions stimulating, but I sensed it was rather different for my two colleagues, though they both admired Lewis greatly. He was like a GP of the old school, and was equipped and ready to handle all kinds of cases, whether personal or corporate.

  Raphael Teff was quiet and scholarly, Michael Roscoe rather more extrovert. I think they must have quickly recognised that I wasn’t cut out for the law, though I’m not sure I realised that myself for quite some while. Nevertheless, they were both amazingly patient and did their best to guide and help me through. In those days there were no computers, nor even word processors, so everything had to be typed, and if in drafting a lease or document you made a mistake or changed your mind – as I invariably did – it all had to be typed again. Incredible now to think of the amount of work this entailed.

  The dapper Mr Fields, as English as they come, was a mine of information, a man of considerable experience and knowledge on whom everyone seemed to rely. He must have seen them come and go over the years, and I always sensed a touch of irony in the way he looked at me. Yet he too was courteous and helpful, if a little formal, never addressing me by my first name. His small moustache was always perfectly trimmed.

  David Lewis’s brother Leonard was an eminent QC whom David would consult from time to time and brief when one of their cases was coming before the courts. Every bit as vibrant as David, and just as brilliant, Leonard Lewis seemed rather intimidating to a rookie like myself, but listening to him in his chambers as he debated various points with David was eye-opening, and both would go out of their way to briefly explain for my benefit the background of whatever they were discussing. They were busy men, but generous to me with their time.

  Sometimes I would have to accompany Michael or Raphael to appear before a Master of the High Court. Masters, I discovered, were a kind of procedural judge who, in the early stages of a case, dealt with all aspects of an action, from its issue until it was ready to go before a trial judge. There was one particularly daunting Master who seemed to relish cross-examining the young solicitor before him, always trying to pick fault with the documents that he was being asked to approve. I felt sorry for my understandably nervous colleagues as we walked towards the Law Courts to face the Master in his cold, stony room, and I dreaded the day it would fall to me to make that journey to the scaffold.

  There was one major case David Lewis was handling. I no longer remember the name of the client he was acting for or what the case was about (insider dealing?) but I do vividly recall the weeks I had to spend in the library of the Law Society, noting down the day-by-day price of a particular share over a six-month period. It seemed an interminable task, and I never understood what the brothers Lewis were looking for, nor whether my findings helped or hindered their case. But it was an insight into the kind of detail that was required and for the first time I began to seriously question whether I was suited to such a demanding profession. Having read the cases of Marshall Hall and other famous lawyers in preparation for my plunge into the law, and doubtless having watched too much television, I imagine I was expecting something rather more glamorous than spending day after day in a dusty library that was as silent as the tomb.

  As the months went by, I became increasingly unhappy and withdrawn. Michael Roscoe, with whom I’d become friendly, would often take me to lunch, and one day he confided, ‘Jeremy, we’re all worried about you, you look so miserable. Please, please think carefully about the law, and whether it’s for you.’ That rather took me aback. Raphael, it seemed, was also concerned, but his approach was less direct. No doubt sensing my growing literary interests, he began to casually mention poems that he’d been reading, which surprised me (perhaps he’d seen me scribbling away at the back desk when I thought no one was looking). He was particularly enthusiastic about Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

  I’d read some Eliot at school, and in fact Murder in the Cathedral had been an A-level set text. I could recite reams of it, but I’d never read Prufrock closely. Now, reading it again as a result of Raphael’s subtle prompting, I found it a revelation – the language, the imagery, the conversational tone, the striking conceits:

  Let us go now you and I

  When the evening is set out against the sky

  Like a patient etherised upon a table…

  Those spellbinding opening lines – written in 1920 yet so modern – went round and round in my head as I gradually started to write, and I now recognise that the voice of Eliot was in almost every line I wrote in those teething days. I was shocked later to discover what many have justly seen as anti-Semitic lines in several of Eliot’s poems, notably in ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’, with the oft-quoted lines, ‘The rats are underneath the piles / The Jew is underneath the lot’.

  Shocking ind
eed, and the lawyer Anthony Julius pulled no punches when he wrote, ‘He [Eliot] did not reflect the anti-Semitism of his times, he contributed to it, even enlarged it.’ Even if I’d been aware of this then, I don’t think it would have diminished my appreciation of Eliot’s poems, nor has it since. Strangely, I have never felt as tolerant about Ezra Pound and his Fascistic activities, but then I have never been as captivated by his poems.

  The poet Emanuel Litvinoff wrote his own powerful response in a poem called ‘To T. S. Eliot’, which ends:

  Let your words

  tread lightly on this earth of Europe

  lest my people’s bones protest.

  I heard him read that chilling poem years later at the launch of an anthology we both had poems in, but there was a famous occasion at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951 when Litvinoff read the poem and Eliot walked in just as he was starting, to the horror of many people there, including Stephen Spender, who protested. But the poet Dannie Abse, who was sitting behind Eliot, heard him mutter, ‘It’s a good poem, a very good poem.’

  * * *

  Things were coming to a climax, and I was becoming more and more depressed. Then, one evening as I was travelling home on a bus from Finchley Road Station, I suddenly found it hard to climb down the stairs. By the time I’d limped home I could hardly move. Alarmed, my father somehow got me up to my room, while my mother watched anxiously. Stretched out on my bed at last, I could barely move at all – it was a kind of paralysis, both frightening and agonising, and the various pills my father gave me had no real effect. I remained like that for three worrying weeks, and the visits of my friends did little to raise my spirits. Obviously worried, and acutely aware of how the mind can control the body, my father decided to ask a physician he knew and respected to visit me.