by John Cleese
My grandfather must have been in his seventies when I first met him. In those days that was a considerable age and I remember him walking rather slowly with the aid of a stick as he, Mother and I made our way along the Somerset lanes. He was a very formal man – restrained and careful and sedate – though he exuded a kind and gentle air. In fact he looked just like Doctor Dolittle and although I liked being around him, and recall how courteous he and Dad were to each other, I don’t remember having much actual fun with him. He had one little joke in his repertoire: he would tell of a pet peacock that flew over the wall into a neighbour’s garden and laid an egg. Did the egg belong to the peacock’s owner or the neighbour? When we’d guessed he would remind us that peacocks didn’t lay eggs. This was not exactly end-of-the-pier, knockabout stuff, and so it did not really surprise me when I learned later that he had passed his whole working life as a clerk in a legal firm.
Grandpa was my only surviving grandparent. My mum’s mother had died many years before. Judging from photographs of her she was an elderly, rather ethereal version of Virginia Woolf. Her husband, Marwood Cross, on the other hand, was about as wraithlike as a warthog: a squat, short-tempered, assertive, graceless little man who in his time was, apparently, one of the most celebrated auctioneers in Weston-super-Mare. (Westonians habitually used inflated language to describe each other: doctors’ names were spoken with a hushed reverence; surgeons and architects were invariably ‘eminent’; lawyers ‘distinguished’; businessmen ‘influential’; firms ‘prestigious’; schoolmasters ‘respected’; and tobacconists ‘renowned’.) Well, there were half a dozen auctioneers in Weston, and they were all prominent, notable and self-impressed. When my parents chose my Christian names, they took John from Grandpa, and Marwood from this other oaf. Mother told me that in the future when people asked my name, and I said, ‘John Marwood Cleese’, they would look surprised and say, ‘Oh! Are you by any chance related to Marwood Cross, the auctioneer?’ Here’s a multiple choice question for you, dear reader: how many times has this actually happened to me during my seven-plus decades on the planet? a) 5,000 times, b) Twice, c) Never.
Marwood Cross was a celebrated, red-faced bully who ran a tight ship. When the table was laid for meals, a cane was placed by his cutlery, so that he could swat any of his children if their table manners faltered. He was also an eminent coward: when a burglar was once diagnosed in the basement, he appeared on the balcony outside his second-floor bedroom, ringing a handbell, and ordering his children and the maid to go and investigate. His main form of entertainment was writing poison-pen letters, which he would get my father to post from unlikely Somerset villages which he happened to pass through in the course of his quest to sell insurance policies. Marwood was also a past master of the art of auctioneering. If he fancied the look of anything he’d been asked to auction, he’d knock it down quickly to an imaginary buyer before the bidding got going, snaffling his prey at a cut-throat price while maintaining his reputation as a pillar of the community. I’d like to apologise publicly for the fact that some of his genes are present in my body. They will be hunted down when the technology is available.
Marwood Cross, eminent auctioneer.
The final missing grandparent was my dad’s mother. She had died in the early 20s, and I know almost nothing about her. This, I now realise, is because her death upset Dad so much that even many years later he never talked about her. I discovered this quite by chance. When I was about fourteen or so, I was rummaging through a tiny, ancient suitcase that contained all his old family papers, and I found a letter that she had written to him just before she died. When I showed it to Dad, a strange look flashed across his face, and he told me he had not read it again since he had first received it. He opened it and after a few seconds started to sob. It was the only time I saw Dad cry. Later he told me that his tears were not just for her loss, but because he had always felt a terrible guilt that he had been away in India and the Far East during the last four years of her life. Communication and travel were so slow in those days that he wasn’t able to get back in time to say goodbye. He believed that he had let her down; that, in some strange way, she might have felt abandoned by him. He showed me the last page of this, her final letter to him, and how her signature trailed away towards the bottom of the page, a long, thin straggly line, which he interpreted as her ‘giving up’. I was able, even at that young age, to realise that he had been carrying this sorrow inside him for nearly thirty years, and that this was the reason he and Mother never mentioned my grandmother’s name.
Strange assortment of Brent Knoll folk, with Grandpa Cheese at far right, Mother (with squared shoulders) and me (with blunt implement).
Not only did I never see Dad cry again, I never heard him raise his voice in anger, nor utter the word ‘fuck’. This is because he was a gentleman in the best sense of the word: not by breeding, of course, but by acquisition of a way of behaving that was based on a set of values he admired, those of the ‘English gentleman’. During his time in the army, and after that in India and the Far East, he was able to watch some of the finest of this species, and was so impressed by their qualities of courtesy, kindliness, modesty, light-heartedness, courage, honesty, and a constant reluctance to burden others with their problems or difficulties, that he tried to model himself on what he observed.
But when he was born in Bristol, in 1893, all this lay in the future because his family was distinctly lower-middle-class. Young Reggie attended a Catholic school called St Brendan’s College, not because the Cheeses were Catholic, but because the headmaster was one of his father’s best friends. He had a good, quick intelligence but no academic interests whatsoever, and so he left school early and took a job in an insurance office. One of his most endearing traits was his utter lack of ambition, which goes a long way to explain why he remained in insurance for the rest of his life. Another reason was that he was very good with figures, and could do quite complicated sums in his head. This came so naturally to him that he had fallen out with his St Brendan’s maths teacher, who insisted that he should ‘show his workings’. Reggie didn’t see the point.
I’m sure Dad was a useful clerk during the next few years. Given his facility with arithmetic, his excellent manners and his astute understanding of people, he was bound to have been. Moreover it was not in his nature to take pay without giving full value for it. But he was able to combine conscientiousness with light-heartedness. The life he led, full of the japes, pranks and put-ons that he and his pals perpetrated, sounded just like the one described in his favourite book, Three Men in a Boat. He and his friends even played tricks on visitors to the insurance office, coating a walking stick with treacle, for example, so that helpful people who picked it up to hand over to them would get sticky hands. Outside the office they were more boisterous, but never mean or the slightest bit violent. Weston, as the nearest seaside resort, was often the setting for their antics. They would take donkey rides, set off in different directions and then leave the donkeys in people’s gardens to eat the flowers. Their most spectacular caper involved removing several small plucked chickens from a butcher’s shop, smuggling them into the balcony at the Winter Gardens, and then, on a cue, launching them all high into the air so that they descended on to the orchestra that was playing while gentlefolk were taking afternoon tea.
Dad lived at home with his parents until he was twenty-two. With the outbreak of the First World War in the late summer of 1914, he tried to sign up, but failed the medical because he couldn’t read the fourth line down on the optician’s chart. Later in the war the army became less picky, but before that happened he volunteered again. This time he asked the man in front of him in the queue to memorise the line he couldn’t read, and to tell him what it was on the way out. The subterfuge allowed him to join the carnage in France, albeit under an assumed name; he was fed up with being teased that he was a fermented curd, so he changed the ‘h’ to an ‘l’. I never understood what he was hoping to achieve; I was always called ‘Ch
eese’ from the moment I arrived at a school. Perhaps his regiment, the Gloucesters, lacked the imagination to make the connection.
After he finished his training, he was made a second lieutenant, the lowest commissioned rank in the army hierarchy. He never knew why he was chosen to be an officer, but assumed it was because he spoke grammatical English. Arriving in France in 1915, he was, within weeks, wounded in the back and shoulders by shrapnel (the scars were still visible thirty-odd years later). So he wrote a letter of resignation to his commanding officer (the army was a very gentlemanly affair in those days), returned to England and convalesced. Once the wounds had healed, he enlisted again, this time as a private. A shouting match ensued when the army discovered that he had previously served as an officer, but they eventually calmed down and agreed to let him return to France as a mere lance-corporal. I always thought this was a loveably eccentric act on Dad’s part, typical of his lack of interest in career advancement, until I discovered years later that the life expectancy of a junior officer on the Western Front at that time was . . . six weeks. Because when an officer led his men over the top, the Germans looked for the man with a revolver and a whistle, and shot him first.
When, as a young boy immediately after the Second World War, I used to accompany Dad in the car on some of his insurance trips, he would tell me not only stories from his war years, but also funny and fascinating tales of what happened to him next. Apparently when the Armistice was signed in 1918, his commanding officer asked him what he was going to do now that the war was over. He said that he planned to return to Bristol and carry on selling insurance. ‘No! No!’ cried the colonel. ‘You must go and see the Empire, young man!’ and promptly wrote Dad a couple of letters of introduction and recommendation. Just a few weeks later, therefore, Dad found himself on a boat bound for Bombay where, thanks to the colonel’s contacts, he had secured a job selling marine insurance with a big British company called the Union of Canton. And now he began to live quite a posh life. He was no longer an insurance salesman: he was a marine underwriter; and because he looked very presentable and had the right accent and excellent manners and was witty and amusing, he began mixing with middle-middle-class people from ‘good’ public schools, and even occasionally with some real toffs, many of whom proved to be friendly and good-natured and cultivated. Mind you, these folk had a lot to be good-natured about: they lived like micro-princes. When Dad found a house to share, he discovered that there were fourteen servants attached to it; when he suggested reducing this extraordinary number, the Indians explained, with great charm and regret, that he was not allowed to do this: it was his duty as an English gentleman to employ at least that number.
The fellow Dad found himself sharing with was called Wodehouse, and he turned out to be a brother of the great PG. Dad thought him immensely likeable: charming, wonderfully companionable and considerate, but, oddly, seemingly without any sense of humour. What was even odder, though, was the degree of Wodehouse’s naivety. Like Dad he was in his mid-twenties, but it was only when visiting a doctor in Bombay that he discovered that his foreskin was retractable. It’s hard to credit that a chap could get through a couple of decades without stumbling upon this fact (about a part of one’s body of considerable interest to most males) but I think it throws light on PG’s status as a great comic writer. If his brother was as naive as this, is it possible that PG himself lacked a certain degree of worldliness, of the everyday experience of the average man-about-town, of actual, ordinary savoir faire? And if so, is it possible that this very ingenuousness is connected with the rather simplified psychology of PG’s characters, which forces me to regard him as a very good comic writer rather than a great one?
Not that I have anything against naivety itself: every single person I really like has a degree of it, and the people I detest the most are know-it-alls, but there is a point at the far end of the naivety continuum where it becomes indistinguishable from ordinary common-or-garden brainlessness. The question that must be faced is: is it more likely that a man would make a Nazi propaganda broadcast BY MISTAKE – as PG claimed he did – if he shared genes with someone who was unaware that his foreskin was retractable? To this, I believe that the answer is a resounding ‘Yes!’
All in all, Dad had a wonderful time in India (not least because he was not present when Wodehouse made his discovery), and he always talked of the Indians in tones of total affection. But there’s no doubt that it was very much a colonial, master–servant relationship. Dad spoke some Hindi, but he once admitted that the only part of a Hindi verb that he ever knew was the imperative. He and his pals were a high-spirited lot – scarcely surprising given the horrendous war they had just endured. (To put this in perspective, it has been claimed that more damage was done to buildings in Cambridge on Guy Fawkes Night of 1945 by boisterous undergraduates recently returned from fighting in Europe, than was achieved by German bombers during the whole of the Second World War.) They had a tendency, therefore, to behave the way rugby teams traditionally do on Saturday nights. As a rule they were rowdy and naughty rather than nasty, but Dad did recall an occasion when things went a bit further. Apparently a Welsh friend called Davies invited him for a drive one Sunday afternoon in his open car, and Dad was surprised, as he climbed into the back seat behind the chauffeur, to find a small pile of bricks there. He pointed them out to Davies, who said he would explain what they were for in due course. Ten minutes later Davies picked one up and lobbed it through the front window of a shop they were passing. The Indian chauffeur found this as amusing as his employer. Dad was astonished, but reflected that at least it was a Sunday and the shop was shut.
Dad’s misbehaviour was relatively low-key. He kept a letter, which he treasured, from a famous Bombay hotel, barring him from entering its precincts again, and listing at length his various pranks, involving butter dishes, and trays of that classic Anglo-Indian dish kedgeree, and the launching of other edible projectiles. But, once he became a member of the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, I suspect his conduct improved: he relished mixing with real live gentlemen, and I can see now that his admiration of them also involved studying their demeanour and habits, and mimicking them. And in due course, teaching some of it to me. ‘Never look startled, my boy. Move slowly. If somebody drops something, and you want to look, wait a few seconds, and then turn round in a leisurely way, and glance. Don’t stare.’
The only blight on Dad’s sojourn in India was that he caught malaria, which was to afflict him for years to come. When an attack came, all he could do was to retreat to his bed for several days, trembling and sweating, teeth chattering, feeling so weak he could do nothing but stay there, patiently losing weight.
After three years in India the Union of Canton transferred him to their Hong Kong office, and shortly afterwards he was re-transferred to their main office in Canton. Outside the British Empire for the first time, he saw things that made Bombay look like Cheltenham. He visited an opium den; he got tattoos; and he ate a dog. (I’ll rephrase that: he ate a delicious dish, which he subsequently discovered was ‘dog’.) He also had a clerk working for him whom he much liked. A Chinese chap who spoke excellent English and was charming and highly competent. One day, however, he did not turn up at the office. Enquiries were made and it turned out he was in jail. Dad (typically) went straight to the prison and asked to see the governor, who greeted him most courteously and explained that his clerk had been found guilty of ‘illegal political activities’. Dad asked how long he would be in prison. The governor said, ‘I am afraid we are executing him in the morning.’
I used to think it was extraordinary that shortly after this, Dad was to be found back in Weston-super-Mare. Had he also been engaged in illegal political activities? Was he feeling bad about the dog? (Apparently it was truly scrumptious, so he could have been removing himself from further temptation.) Or was he just tired of excitement? Actually, the answer was simple: malaria. The attacks had weakened him and he was worried that unless he removed himself to cooler clime
s, he might kick the bucket. As it was, by the time he got back to Blighty, his weight was down to around eleven ounces, which is not much for a man of six feet: he was the standard ‘bag of bones’. The attacks continued for several years before they started to peter out; meanwhile he was one of the few in Weston on quinine.
But first he went down to Bristol to visit his father, whom he’d not seen for five years, and stayed there to recuperate while his spinster sister, Dorothy, looked after him. They were very fond of each other and spent a lot of time together, engrossed in their common interest: smoking. Dad had formed a habit of forty a day (untipped) and Dorothy matched him, stub for stub. Despite this, he slowly regained his health, and started making excursions to the nearest seaside town, which happened to be dear old Weston-super-Mare. While visiting, he bumped into Mother, they started walking out together, despite Marwood demanding she should be home by ten o’clock (she was twenty-six), and fell in love. Within just a few months they decided to get married.
My parents, not planning to have a child.
And – here’s the romantic bit – they eloped!
They had to. They came from families of different social class, and there was no way that Marwood Cross was going to give his blessing to a wedding between his daughter and a commoner. Well, not a commoner exactly, just someone commoner. The gap in status between Muriel Cross and this dubious tattooed proletarian lounge lizard was unbridgeable. You see, Dad came from, at best, the middle-lower-middle class; to be exact, he was middle-middle-lower-middle class. Whereas Muriel Cross came from the great auctioneering house of Marwood Cross, who were almost middle-middle class; their lowest possible social classification was upper-upper-lower-middle class. And so far as Marwood was concerned, a morganatic arrangement was out of the question.
