by Nick Webb
Such correlations are probabilistic at best. For instance, being left-handed, like Douglas, is also a factor that is associated with a greater number of writers, musicians, mathematicians and sporting prodigies than population distribution would predict.* 32 Sinistrality also touches upon the issue of the extent to which we humans are bio-robots, with gross characteristics determined by genetic inheritance, or free agents capable of rational choice. This immensely complicated question fascinated Douglas in later life.
Back in the early 1950s in Ridley College, it became obvious both to the teaching staff and to Christopher that he was not suited for the clerical life. They parted company without rancour, and Christopher took up teaching locally. But this was a calling for which his energy, sarcasm and impatience disqualified him temperamentally, and eventually he found a better role as a probation officer. Some of his family have speculated that it gave a degree of authority over his errant clients that appealed to his appetite for control, but whatever the motivation of this complex man he seems to have done the job effectively. Both Heather, Christopher’s daughter by his second marriage, and Sue recall that he communicated well with Borstal kids. Though he failed to apply the same skill to his own life, he brought to their problems a professional clarity. Towards the end of his life—for like all the Adams men he could speak well in public—he also gave lectures on probation work, and on that basis described himself as a management consultant. As Douglas himself remarked, “Dad and management [were] concepts that do not belong together.”
In July 1960, Christopher Adams remarried. Mary Judith Stewart, born Judith Robertson, was a widow. Her first husband, William Alistair McLean Beardmore Stewart, known as “B,” was unusually also her stepbrother. In 1944, as a Royal Air Force Officer, he had been killed on a disastrous mission to Norway. One of Judith’s brothers was killed shortly afterwards. Her mother had died when she was seven; her father had remarried, but had then died in tragic circumstances when Judith was eighteen. In contrast to a society in which many of us reach our fifties without any experience of mortality, Judith had been stalked by death since childhood.
Christopher’s new wife was also wealthy. Through family connections her money came from shipbuilding on the Clyde from the days when Britain was once a major shipbuilding power, and the Clyde was lined for miles with cranes and gantries, shipyards and slipways. Under Christopher’s influence, Judith came to have less and less to do with her own side of the family. It was as if she had to start her life over again with a new set of family relationships put in place for her. From the photographs Judith was a good-looking woman of the Scottish variety—slim, pale, handsome rather than pretty—with a look in her eyes suggesting vulnerability. She lived to be eighty, dying in 2000 only six months before Douglas.
By her first husband Judith had two daughters, Rosemary and Karena. Rosemary, the older, is now a trained therapist practising in Edinburgh. (By chance she also married a Stewart—Quentin, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property.) Rosemary was in her teens when her mother remarried, and she recalls being quite taken by surprise.
The way it happened was that my mother arrived at my boarding school a week before I was due to leave, which was unheard of because days out were strictly rationed. She was suddenly there, and she took me and my sister down to the cottage . . . We must have been in the car—and this chap was there, and the boot was open and there were suitcases in it. [He was] a big chap, dark, bearded. Anyway, hello, hello, who’s this? We went down to the cottage, and she sat on my bed and she said, guess what we’ve done. And I just knew, and said, you’ve got married. And that was it. We hadn’t known about it. So that was quite devastating really, absolutely devastating. It’s relatively recently—I suppose in the last fifteen years or so—that I’ve actually looked at it and dealt with it.
Certainly Rosemary Stewart believes that her mother was dominated by Christopher: “Mum was Christopher’s doormat.” Via their mother’s second marriage the girls found themselves inherited by this huge, complicated, overpowering man. As with many stepfather/stepdaughter relationships, it had its difficulties.
Karena, on the other hand, who was born after the death of her own father, was not quite so shocked at her mother’s remarriage. She recalls that her head was in the clouds for most of her teens. She had suffered badly from anorexia, a condition that predated the appearance of Christopher in her mother’s life. Her memory of her stepfather is that when she was very low he would sit and talk to her for hours on end. Of course, there can be an ambivalence about altruism (a means of control? fuel for your own self-esteem?), but it would be ungenerous not to recognize that Christopher helped Karena through her illness.* 33 It was another example of his talent for sorting out other people’s lives while being unable to sort out his own. However, Judith’s daughters found the relationship with their stepfather tricky, and it is perhaps no coincidence that they both married young and left home.
After their marriage, Judith and Christopher moved to “Derry,” a beautiful house in Stondon Massey. This pretty Essex village—more of a hamlet—is only ten miles up the road from Brentwood, where Sue and Douglas still lived with Mum and Granny. Their nearest railway station was in Brentwood itself and a car was essential. Christopher wanted a sports car, so Judith bought him a Sunbeam Alpine. This was not exciting enough, however, since what he really yearned for was an Aston Martin. Also at Judith’s expense, he was to have several in turn.* 34
J.G. Ballard said that we all inhabit an immense novel. In Christopher’s version, which he inhabited almost certainly as the only probation officer in the country with an Aston Martin, ownership of a fast car was undoubtedly part of a character he thought of as roguishly charismatic.
Christopher Adams was proud of his driving and intolerant of other drivers. Followed on one occasion along a narrow road by a motorist he considered too close, he stopped and opened the boot and suggested to the man behind that he might like to get in it. Apparently he was quite unambiguous about it. Christopher had passed a high-performance driving course which allowed him to display an HPC badge on the windscreen, and he was keen to point this out to lesser motorists. His cousin, Shirley, remembers how his car was once scraped in an irritating but minor prang in a supermarket car park. Christopher was beside himself with a disproportionate and frightening anger. Once, as a child, Sue Adams recalls falling asleep in the Aston when her father was driving, and waking up to find the landscape was whizzing by at a feverish lick. A glance at the speedometer revealed the truth: 145 mph. (It was partly for drivers like Christopher that Barbara Castle, when Minister of Transport in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, introduced the 70 mph limit on motorways—thus interfering with the individual’s inalienable right to be hosed away by nauseated firemen.) Sue Adams’s memory of the 145 mph moment is that she willed herself to fall asleep again.
All Christopher’s children and stepchildren found themselves somewhat displaced when, in 1962, Judith and Christopher produced their own child, Heather Adams. Christopher doted on her. She was the apple of his eye.
Meanwhile, in the other part of Douglas’s family life, he and his sister continued to live with their mum, their granny, the slowly dying granddad, and a floating population of sick animals. Every weekend, however, Douglas and Sue went to see their father and his new wife.
Stondon Massey is rural Essex at its poshest. “Derry” was a huge mock-Tudor affair with a sweeping drive, acres of lawn and its own tennis court. At one point Judith also had a flat in Kensington and some domestic staff to help out, a couple called José and Maria. It is odd, given how money expands one’s options, that Judith and Christopher should choose to stay in a house only ten miles from Brentwood, and Christopher’s first family.
It must have been strange for the kids, commuting between Brentwood and Stondon Massey, so close geographically yet parsecs apart financially and socially. What do you make of breakfast with devilled kidneys served in a silver chafing dish when you are used
to cornflakes? Perhaps children do not draw clear conclusions at the time. There is film of Douglas, a tall, gawky schoolboy in dreadful shorts and a tie, with Sue Adams and little Heather, all playing together in the huge garden of the house in Stondon Massey. Douglas runs around, arms and legs all over the place, throwing a ball for the infant Heather, who was round and blonde and smiling, and he shows a touching protectiveness towards the girls from both households. Sometimes, when Judith’s two older girls were home from school, all the children were together. You have to wonder if the children quite understood where they all came from. Rosemary recalls her confusion when she first met Christopher’s other kids:
It probably wasn’t until after Christmas [1960] that my mother would have said to us, oh, by the way, Chris has some children and they are going to come on Saturday. It was quite bizarre—and I’d said, “Oh, right,” you know—in those days it was really sort of Andy Pandy. “Shall I make some sandwiches?” And I remember the first day we saw them, just looking at them. I remember where they were standing—very solemn, both of them. I don’t know, maybe I was very solemn too. And it was quite difficult to know—you know, what is the relationship?
Christopher and Janet could not, or would not, bear to see each other so Grandmama Donovan helped in the mechanics of moving the children around for the weekends. Sometimes she and Judith would meet up at a bank in Ongar for a handover reminiscent of the Cold War spy exchanges, and indeed she and Judith struck up a good relationship. Karena remembers that Granny Donovan was quite often to be seen in “Derry.” Christopher refused to speak to Janet; their silence endured for decades. (When Sue Adams got married, it took a lot of negotiation to get Christopher to attend.)
Douglas’s attitude to money, when he later made a lot of it, must have been influenced by his early knowledge of just how it bought comfort and goodies. Karena remembers her mother once remarked that Christopher and Douglas were far too alike to get on. Certainly Douglas shared with his father an utter lack of pragmatism, along with an awesome appetite for treats. At his memorial service he was retrospectively teased for once being found to have eight horrifically expensive cameras in the back of his car. But unlike his father, Douglas did not let his life pivot around money for its own sake; to him it was just a means to an end. Fun and access to interesting experiences were the main goals—and, being by nature delightfully generous, he was also keen that friends and loved ones should share such pleasures.
Judith’s own considerable wealth was deployed unstintingly on behalf of her husband and, interestingly, all the children, including Christopher’s children by his first marriage. She set up a trust fund for all of them, with Christopher’s friend from Toc H, G.R. Roche, as one of the trustees.
One national slander against the British is that we are not very good with children. As generalizations go, this is tosh, but for a certain caste of British society there was a time when some of the emotional complexities of raising kids were thought to be best resolved by sending them to boarding school. Both Douglas and Sue went to fee-paying schools paid for by Judith. Douglas attended Brentwood, starting with its prep school, Middleton Hall. Sue went to Felixstowe College, as subsequently did Heather Adams. Given how eye-wateringly expensive it is to see three kids through the thirteen years or so of education at private schools, it is especially beneficent when two of them are not your own.
Why did Judith do it? Rosemary says her mother had an acute sense of fair play and duty, and by all accounts she was a very decent person. Perhaps Christopher might also have put pressure on her. You can imagine conversations along the lines of, “They’re my children, but it’s you who’s got the money, so of course it’s up to you . . .” The evidence suggests, however, that Judith paid simply because she felt it was the right thing to do on behalf of all their children. What Janet felt about her kids being educated on the ticket of Christopher’s rich second wife is an interesting question. But she is nothing if not practical, and obviously she wanted the best for her children.
In 1964, Janet also remarried, a local vet called Ron Thrift, a man for whom there seems to have been nothing but affection and respect. On his death from cancer in 1991, aged only fifty-nine, the entire community attended a memorial service. When he moved to Shaftesbury in Dorset to set up a new practice, Janet went with him, while Douglas and Susan continued at Brentwood School and Felixstowe College as boarders. Ron, however, took an interest in Janet’s kids by her first marriage and did his best to look after their welfare.
Soon after their marriage, Ron and Janet produced a son and a daughter of their own. The elder, Jane Thrift, whom Douglas loved with a fierce fraternal protectiveness, is known in the family as Little Jane, to distinguish her from Big Jane, i.e. Douglas’s wife Jane Belson, who’s striking for her elegance but also, at six foot, for her height. (Confusingly, while Douglas and Big Jane were tacking, yacht-like, through storm-force seas towards their eventual marriage, there was also a Wrong Jane as opposed to Right Jane.) Years later, Little Jane was to live with them in London where a flat was created for her in the basement of their large and beautiful house in one of Islington’s finest Georgian terraces. Little Jane, like her mother, eventually trained as a nurse, before deciding, very much under Douglas’s influence, that life had more to offer her.* 35
Little Jane’s full brother, James Thrift, now runs a business with his wife, Bronwen, in the West Country bringing the virtues of good design to a local market. His dry sense of humour is very reminiscent of Douglas—which, even allowing for it as a family trait, is not surprising, since Douglas’s size and personality must have had a striking effect on a young lad. Douglas saw a lot of his two new half-siblings, dividing the holidays equally between his parents’ families. Christopher and Janet at that time were still not exchanging a syllable with each other. Geographically, too, there was now quite a distance between them to be covered. Even these days, Essex to Dorset is not an easy journey—and sometimes it was one that Douglas made as a hitchhiker. (Once or twice he also rode a much too small motorbike with his knees sticking out like parachute brakes.) The sense of commuting between different worlds must have continued as acute as ever.
To recap: Douglas had one full sister, Sue Adams; two stepsisters, Rosemary and Karena; one paternal half-sister, Heather Adams; and two maternal half-siblings, Jane and James. In later life he made strenuous efforts to get them all together as adults—perhaps to recreate a family that he had missed as a child.
As for his relations with his dad, we can only speculate. Heather Adams, who now lives in the Canary Islands with her husband and their two children, is sophisticated and articulate, like all the Adams children of that generation, but a certain caution comes into her voice when talking about her father. She recalls that Douglas’s relationship with Christopher was always immensely fraught, but that the two men were never able to talk about it.
Nonetheless, when Douglas was in his teens his father did sometimes take him in the Aston Martin on extravagant holidays abroad. This in itself must have been a bit galling for Rosemary and Karena, since their mother had always been careful with money, not out of meanness but from anxiety. Christopher’s love of spending, on the other hand, may have helped to bring him and Douglas together, but it appears that in their anguished, perhaps curiously British way, their conversation always avoided any subject of the slightest emotional importance. No matter how well Christopher communicated with the delinquents in his professional charge, between him and his only son the tension of things left unsaid lasted all their lives.
Frustration dogged Douglas’s relationship with his father even as death finally crept up on Christopher in co-respondent’s shoes in 1985, regardless of the fact that, like his son, Christopher was concerned about his blood pressure and started going to a gym in the last decade of his life. When it was clear that Christopher was dying, Judith summoned the family to his bedside in Droitwich Hospital. Douglas had flown back from the States the previous day. The vigil must have been
harrowing, and the family members took it in turns to leave the room and lie down for a while. When Christopher chose the moment to depart, it was during his son’s brief absence. Douglas was devastated. “Bloody typical,” he said, “bloody typical Dad—waited till I was out.”
Christopher Adams and Douglas were so similar in size and appearance that Douglas said that seeing his father laid out in death was like looking at his own dead body. Christopher, returning to his roots, left instructions that his ashes were to be thrown in Loch Fyne.
Five years later, The Deeper Meaning of Liff was published. Co-written with John Lloyd, it’s a brilliant attempt to save all those unemployed concepts from hanging about and getting into mischief when they really need a respectable word to settle down with. Characteristically, Douglas turns the anguish that he must have associated with Droitwich into a joke about misconstruing intentions:
Droitwich (n)
A street dance. The two partners approach from opposite directions and try politely to get out of each other’s way. They step to the left, step to the right, apologize, step to the left again, bump into each other, and repeat as often as unnecessary.
Nobody knows for sure how much his father meant to Douglas. Jane Belson confirms that he always found that relationship very difficult, adding what a pity it is that there was nobody who ever told the young Douglas that he was clever, and that it was all right to be so. In some English households there was a notion—now mercifully extinct—that praising children too fulsomely, or, indeed, at all, might induce personality disorders. It is such a pity that Christopher, a complex man full of anger and unresolved conflicts, who spread havoc through two generations, was never able to say: well done, son, you’ve done brilliantly, I’m so pleased. Douglas went through his life without ever hearing the words he needed to hear from his father. Some family members think Christopher would have been jealous of Douglas’s fame, yet he was without a doubt immensely proud of his son. The trouble is: he never let on.
