Under Cover

by Jeremy Robson

  The lines of print are always sidelines

  And all our games funeral games…

  Unquestionably, MacNeice was that rare thing, a real poet: his mastery and wit, the accuracy and originality of his imagery, his erudition, verbal acrobatics and versatility were exciting and original. To quote from his poem ‘Suicide’, ‘This man with the shy smile / has left behind something that was intact’. I wish I’d been able to say all that to his face.

  * * *

  Gradually I began to feel at home at Aldus and even Foges, who still hadn’t the faintest idea who I was, would nod in a distracted way as, deep in thought, he paced the corridor or walked slowly down the stairs on his way to lunch. All that was to change quite soon, but meanwhile, outside the effervescent world of Aldus, the poetry and jazz concerts continued apace, with three in the month after I’d joined the company – at the Hampstead Theatre, the Bromsgrove Arts Festival and the Victoria Theatre, Stoke on Trent. At Stoke we had an apocalyptic moment when I started to read a poem with jazz called ‘Cascade’. The poem starts with the line, ‘Can you hear the thunder’ and as I read it the heavens opened, there was lightning and the loudest clap of thunder any of us had ever heard, drowning out the words and music. What timing! The applause went on and on.

  A more unusual concert was to follow at the instigation of a remarkable man called Harley Usill who ran Argo records. A subsidiary of Decca, Argo had a superb catalogue of Shakespeare, contemporary poetry, traditional folk music, birdsong, steam locomotives and other specialist subjects. Harley always had a sharp ear for the unusual, and profit was rarely his motivating force. Having heard a tape of one of our concerts, he decided to arrange one of his own – in the famous Abbey Road recording studios before a live audience – and that recorded concert took place on 10 June 1963. The poets reading were Dannie Abse, Laurie Lee, Adrian Mitchell and me, while Michael Garrick’s Quintet included Shake Keane and Joe Harriott; the concert was later issued on two LPs. In his autobiography, Garrick wrote that he’d seen the records on sale for £1,400, even though they’d recently been issued on CD. That may or may not be so, but when you pass the crowds of tourists outside the Abbey Road studios, forget the Beatles and remember that we were there too! Mention of the Beatles reminds me that, his young family being huge fans of theirs, Dannie Abse once persuaded me to phone him at home and say to whichever of his children answered, ‘Hello, this is John Lennon. May I speak to Dr Abse, please?’ I think that impressed them at the time more than any of their father’s poems, though Dannie did come clean after a while. It was his eldest daughter Keren who answered the phone, and she told me recently that because John Lennon had just published a book of poems, it had seemed credible that her dad should know him.

  Alongside these concerts of ours, another front was opening up in the form of Tribune poetry readings. Poetry had become such a strong feature of the paper, what with my almost weekly reviews and the new poems the paper now published regularly, that it seemed a natural progression. When I put the idea to Elizabeth Thomas, she jumped at it, proposing that we start in the autumn – monthly readings to be held in the Regent’s Park Library in Robert Street, which was fairly central and had a useful pub on the corner with Albany Street where we’d gather before and after the event. Meanwhile, she would use the summer months to announce the readings in the paper and build up interest. I greatly looked forward to these, and started to draw up a list of possible poets for her to consider. We wanted them to be as wide-ranging as possible, with a good sprinkling of young poets alongside the more established.

  Tribune announces the first of the paper’s popular monthly poetry readings.

  * * *

  By this time Carole, if not exactly a groupie, had become a fixture in the poetry and jazz line-up. Since I generally had to get to venues early to check things out, she’d often follow on with Dannie in his car. They never seemed to agree on the route (it became a running joke), but somehow they always arrived in time – just. Selling books was an important part of the concerts for all concerned, especially for Dannie and Laurie, who would appear with competing piles under their arms, and Carole quickly found herself looking after sales during the interval and after the concert.

  Laurie Lee exhorts Carole to sell more of his books.

  By then the ‘ons’ in our relationship seemed to have become far more frequent than the ‘offs’, and Carole’s parents were definitely getting edgy, her father even inviting me to Queen’s Club, where, walking me round and round the car park instead of facing me on the courts, he aired his concerns. I suppose that even though I was now earning £1,000 a year, I didn’t offer the greatest security for his young daughter. He must have known, though, that she was in some ways a chip off the old block, quite capable of making up her own mind – and as far as I knew she hadn’t done so yet, and nor, for that matter, had I!

  But when Carole’s mother Jocy invited me to tea a few days later, I realised things were getting a little too serious. Perhaps she’d never really recovered from the day Carole told her a poet was calling for her and I walked in with my just-under-seven-foot friend Michael Rivkin. Endearingly, Carole’s mother never quite came to terms with English manners, nor for that matter with the English language, so would address anyone in a shop she went to as ‘Madame’, try to shake hands with all and sundry, and always felt fruit carefully before buying it – which might have been acceptable in the markets of Cairo, but didn’t always go down well in Maida Vale. Perhaps at that stage I was just another of those English things she didn’t quite fathom, though in time she would, and we’d enjoy many a six o’clock whisky together. She really was the gentlest and loveliest of women, not to mention stylish. Looking back, I can well understand that coming from a Middle Eastern background and having been uprooted, their world turned upside down in the way it had been, Carole’s parents would have felt especially protective of their daughter, particularly as the worlds of publishing and poetry must have seemed very alien to them. I’m not sure I was that understanding at the time!

  My family could not have been more different. My father has already featured in some of the early chapters of this book, so let me introduce my mother, Charlotte, and her side of the family. Her mother, the gracious Harriette of one of my poems, was the daughter of a remarkable man, Morris Wartski, founder of the antique jeweller’s of the same name, in whose house in Llandudno I was born. An immigrant from Turek near Karlisch in Poland (then part of Imperial Russia), Morris had landed with his wife Flora in Liverpool. There, at first he followed the traditional family business as a licensed pedlar, travelling around with his stock of silver watches, jewellery and silks in a bag on his back, for sale to local gentry and farmers.

  The story has it that one hot day the young Morris had called at a farm and was crossing the Menai Bridge in Anglesey when a dogcart drew up and the driver offered him a lift, which he gratefully accepted. The two of them fell into a learned conversation about the Bible, and the man was so impressed by Morris’s erudition that he gave him his card, urging him to be in touch. It was Morris’s lucky day, for the man turned out to be the Earl of Uxbridge, soon to inherit the title of Marquess of Anglesey and a fortune, and in due course he set Morris up in business with a shop in Bangor High Street. Fifteen years later, in 1910, Morris moved the flourishing business to the more fashionable Llandudno, taking two large premises in Mostyn Street, the main shopping area. A man of great taste and entrepreneurial flair, he also rented showcases in the two main hotels.

  My grandfather Emanuel Snowman (my mother’s father), who had originally worked as an estate agent and auctioneer in Kilburn, joined the Wartski business shortly after it opened and a year later married Morris’s daughter Harriette. That was his lucky day, for my future grandmother was a strong, highly intelligent, elegant woman who was to make her own mark in many areas. In 1911, the young couple moved to London, where Emanuel opened a branch of the Wartski business in New Bond Street. Like many Jewish families of that era,
the Snowmans had their colourful roots in Eastern Europe, Emanuel’s father Abraham settling in Spitalfields when he first came to England, before setting up business as a picture dealer and framer. He and his wife Rachel had ten children, most of whom I knew. They were a remarkable tribe. Three brothers were involved with the royal family – Emanuel, who became a royal jeweller; Isaac (Icky), one of the foremost portrait painters of his day, who painted a number of royal portraits, many of which appeared on the popular Raphael Tuck postcards; and Dr Jacob (Jack) Snowman, who circumcised several royals, including Prince Charles. When Prince George was born, there was widespread speculation in the press as to whether his parents would follow royal tradition and have him circumcised. Most of these stories referred to my great-uncle Jack, calling him a rabbi. He wasn’t, although he was fairly Orthodox. He was a medical doctor who became famous as a mohel (circumciser). A highly cultured man, he gave me a set of leather-bound Dickens novels for my bar mitzvah, and whenever I visited him he loved to talk about Browning, a poet he greatly admired. Jacob’s son, Dr Leonard Snowman, inherited the mantle when his father died. The family used to say he lived on tips!

  Another of the Snowman brothers, Louis, was also a painter, but far less successful than Icky. I remember Uncle Louis well, often going to his studio in Kilburn. A small man, always neatly dressed with a bow tie, he was more bohemian than Icky, possibly even a communist, and he seemed to rather resent his brother’s success. My mother told me how she once took her Uncle Icky, with whom she was close, to Louis’s studio and that he wouldn’t let them in until he’d turned all the paintings to the wall. She was also with Icky in Jerusalem when he was stabbed by an Arab (fortunately not fatally) near the Wailing Wall, a subject he painted several times. Louis claimed to know the painters Jankel Adler and David Bomberg, and perhaps he did. On one of my visits to his studio, he gave me a book by the Irish writer George Moore in which Moore wrote that every young man’s ideal mistress was thirty years old. I went around for quite a while looking for women of thirty! When Louis died, he left his studio to my cousin Colin Snowman, a fine painter with whom I’ve always felt a strong kinship. Indeed, I helped him find a gallery in Sloane Street for his first major solo exhibition. I thought of this recently when the highly esteemed critic John Berger died, for he had reviewed Colin’s work enthusiastically in the New Statesman. I looked up to Colin, not just for his artistic abilities or because he was several years older than me, but because he was the bohemian in the family whose way of life chimed with my poetic aspirations. During the later part of the war (I was born two days after it began), when bombs were exploding on London, the female members of our inner family circle were dispatched with their children to the relatively safe haven of a farm in north Wales. It was there that I locked Colin in a barn, returning to the farmhouse feeling not a little anxious and rather guilty – only to find him waiting for me. It had been easy enough for him to climb out of a window, but he didn’t reveal that at the time and I remained puzzled by his sudden magical appearance, just as I later marvelled at his ability to model life-like figures out of clay or to paint with striking originality. We must have spent some time in London during the Blitz, for I vividly remember sitting with my mother on the staircase of our house in Edgware, her arms around me, when there was a ferocious explosion and the house shook. She tried to make light of it, pretending it was nothing, but it wasn’t – far from it.

  Emanuel Snowman was a formidable man. Mayor of Hampstead in the coronation year and seemingly formal, he had a deadpan sense of humour and wasn’t above playing practical jokes or hosting a game of poker in his house on Sunday evenings with a bunch of cronies he called ‘gunovim’ (thieves). He also liked to play golf on a Sunday, and Carole and I were with him once when he gave his unsuspecting partner a ball made of soap to tee off with, collapsing with laughter when it flew into pieces all over the course. It was Emanuel who established the firm’s international reputation as an antique jeweller specialising in the work of Carl Fabergé, goldsmith to the Russian Imperial court, and obtaining the royal warrants Wartski still enjoys. It all came about when, in 1925, he had gone where few dared to go at the time – the Soviet Union, where he searched out those objects that were anathema to the Bolsheviks and was able to acquire many of the Imperial treasures of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including some of Fabergé’s most famous Easter eggs. These masterpieces were to be the backbone of the Wartski business. Following in his father’s footsteps, Kenneth Snowman, my mother’s brother – charming, erudite, eccentric, and also a painter – became head of the Wartski firm after Emanuel’s death, building the business further and becoming, through his books, the acknowledged world expert on the work of Fabergé.

  I was close to Kenneth and his wife Sallie from my earliest years and I remember fondly the exciting annual Boxing Day outing to Tom Arnold’s spectacular circus at Haringey Arena to which they always took me and my young cousins. I always felt rather sorry for the clowns and the lions in their cages, but those high-wire artists would have me on the edge of my seat, peering through half-closed eyes. The clubbable Kenneth was a character. He never learned to drive (his adored, ebullient wife driving him everywhere, in more senses than one), he always took a jar of marmalade and a bottle of Macallan with him when he went to America, and his wide circle of friends ranged from Prince Yusupov, one of Rasputin’s murderers, to Bing Crosby and Ian Fleming (he even featured fleetingly in one of Fleming’s books). The witty Kenneth was a real ladies’ man. On one occasion I was on holiday and about to go in the sea when a woman came out of the water and rushed towards me, her arms extended, only to recoil in embarrassment at the last minute, apologising, ‘I’m so sorry, I thought you were someone else.’ ‘You must have thought I was Kenneth Snowman,’ I responded, for we were said to have a strong family resemblance – and I was right, much to her amazement. After his beloved Sallie died, Kenneth was rather a lost soul, although he enjoyed the warm company at the Garrick Club bar, and lunched there most days with a circle of friends that included Kingsley Amis. We did, however, manage to lure him to France, where, dressed like Monet in a crumpled white suit, he arrived with paint, brushes, palette and easel, and set himself up on a slope above the house and painted away. A cherished memory.

  There were, too, several other Snowman brothers I came to know quite well – particularly Henry, a solicitor with a sharp tongue and a mischievous sense of humour who enjoyed poetry and encouraged mine. Strangely, when looking through the deeds of the house we moved into some twenty years ago, we discovered that Henry had handled the conveyancing for an earlier owner. In his later years, which was when I knew him, he lived with his daughter and son-in-law (my cousin Teddy Stonehill’s parents). I’d often seen him stalking around the lawn when I went there on Sundays to play tennis with Ted and some friends, and at the Christmas Eve parties the hospitable Stonehills gave, at which many well-known performers sang or played (and where in future years I would read a poem or two). A large man, Henry appeared a benevolent Victorian elder with his three-piece suit and walking stick, and our encounters and conversations were always spirited. Then there was Sam, an insurance broker – and grandfather of my historian cousin Daniel – who lived opposite us and whom Carole and I would often see walking arm in arm with his wife Rosie. (In our teenage years, Daniel and I were fervent autograph hunters, swapping when we had duplicates and racing to be the first to have 1,000 famous signatures in our collections.) Ezra, another brother, was in the furniture business (which was mighty helpful when Carole and I set up home!). Joey, who lived in Israel and used to write me long letters enclosing postcards of his brother Isaac’s royal portraits, was the image of Albert Steptoe. The brothers Snowman always made me think of Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga.

  I have a particularly vivid teenage memory of accompanying my grandfather as he strode down the exclusive Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, going from antique jeweller to antique jeweller, asking to see what Fabergé pieces they h
ad, carefully examining each in turn, and then declaring them to be substandard, damaged or copies, leaving the startled salesman to recover his objects and his dignity as he moved on to the next shop, relishing every moment. I suspect it wasn’t just the game it appeared to be, and that if something special had caught his eye he might well have tried to acquire it for Wartski – at a special price, that is!

  My grandfather’s death was a traumatic milestone for me. It was the end of an era: the weekly Shabbat (Sabbath) lunches for twenty or more – my grandmother serving at one end of the table, my grandfather next to her – and the all-welcome Passover Seders for fifty or sixty people, soon to be memories. Highly principled, always immaculately dressed with a diamond tie pin given to him by the Queen Mother, he was the head of the family in the old Victorian way, and to my young eyes seemingly indestructible, so his death greatly affected me. As I put it in a poem: