Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  Bang and Josh were married on 4 April 1899 from Lizzie’s new home in Bristol (her husband acting as one of the witnesses). Bang took only one year off her age (making herself a romantic twenty-one instead of twenty-two) on the marriage certificate, and gave her late father’s profession innocuously as ‘Gentleman’. There is no evidence that she went to Eastbourne and saw The Links which was being sold that summer. She was soon pregnant and living in her new home, the Red House, at Datchet, near Windsor in Buckinghamshire. They had chosen Datchet because her sister Ida now lived there.

  On 7 January 1900 Bang and Josh’s first child was born – a son whom they named Desmond Sowley Holroyd. But after sixteen weeks he was to die of bronchial pneumonia. Fraser, who was with his son when he died, was once again the ‘informant’ and signed the death certificate.

  Two years later Adeline gave birth to a daughter. She and Fraser had gone down to stay with Bang’s sister Lizzie at Bristol for the birth, and Yolande Phyllis was born at Lizzie’s home in Victoria Square, Clifton, on 22 April 1902. The house was alive with Corbet sisters, and Alice won the contest to sign Yolande’s birth certificate as one of the many ‘present at the birth’.

  Everyone agreed that it was ‘unfair’ to have only one child. Lizzie had three; so did Lannie; and also Ida. Adeline’s next child, a son whom they christened Kenneth De Courcy, was born at the Red House on 16 December 1903. And that, Adeline decided, was enough. Of course married women were expected to have children – it was their duty. But Bang was in many ways hardly out of childhood herself and never really would be. She was not naturally a loving mother. Her children got so much in the way of the exciting social life she was beginning to enjoy in England. She employed a young Welsh nurse, Kate Griffin (whom the children called ‘Nan’), to look after Yolande and Kenneth; and in 1906 the family left the Red House and moved nearby to Meadowcroft, a house in Bolton Avenue, New Windsor, not far from the castle. But then something unexpected happened. ‘It was here that I was born in 1907,’ writes my father, ‘– an evident mishap.’ The date of his birth was 20 October 1907, and after some debate they named him Basil De Courcy Fraser. What comes through a close reading of my father’s account, written near the end of his life, is his sense of being unwanted: an outsider at home, a reject at school, an exile during later life, and inferior to his elder brother and sister. ‘I was a sickly infant with a pidgeon [sic] chest and a frail hold on life,’ he wrote. ‘Nan sat up night after night looking after me, and there is no doubt that I owed my continued presence in the world to her. I saw little of my mother.’

  The photographs of him at Windsor from infancy through childhood show him more ill-at-ease than ill. Aged one month he lies awkwardly on a cushion between Yolande and Kenneth who are more interested in the photographer than their new sibling. Later he is being held in place on a pony between the others’ smarter horses; and later still he perches precariously on a chaise-longue to make a pretty threesome. For these are studio portraits which the proud parents will pass round their friends. Kenneth puts up with this business quite well – he is like someone holding his breath until the ordeal is over, yet still in command of himself. Basil’s round face looks vulnerable and bewildered – but then he is the youngest. It is Yolande who appears in her element. She ‘makes eyes’ at the camera, puts an arm round her younger brother, sits elegantly on her horse. Or she poses alone, bare feet dangling from a podium. And there she is again, reclining on a sofa, studying a flower, standing small and defiant on a bench in the garden. Like her Aunt Norah she focuses, she comes alive, while her brothers look rather wooden or lost.

  The children saw a good deal of their mother’s sisters and their husbands over these early years, but little of Uncle Pat and his family. He had come back from South Africa with his wife Coral and their son Ivor, been appointed a captain in the Militia in 1903 and gone to live in Hampshire. Here, on 17 November 1908, his daughter Verity was born. My father could not remember going to Ropley Manor, his Uncle Pat’s home in Hampshire, and he believed that his Aunt Coral disapproved of Fraser’s marriage. The two brothers maintained a rather furtive friendship despite the gap that was appearing between their two families and that would widen over the years.

  However, there were plenty of Corbet aunts to entertain the children. Aunt Iley, the pianist, was living not far away at Reigate in Surrey; and jolly punctual Aunt Lizzie they would sometimes visit in Bristol. But my father remembered most vividly going to play at Datchet where his Aunt Ida, the ex-music hall singer, and her husband from the zoo lived. Were the paddocks there really ‘full of Zebras, Giraffes and Wildebeasts’ as he imagined? ‘There was an awful lot to see if one was lucky,’ he insisted. There were those bright birds flying in the aviary and animals at the end of the garden (‘small ones of course and I’ve forgotten what they were now’), and a big pond flashing with red and yellow fish in the sunlight. ‘Halcyon days!’ he exclaimed, recovering with his childhood excitement his authentic childhood spelling.

  There were three Temple daughters with whom my father sometimes played at Datchet. One, prim and religious, later married a man connected with cigarettes (‘Passing Clouds’ they were called) and had numerous daughters herself; another took after her father and devoted her life to horses and dogs; while a third, reviving memories of her mother’s music hall days, travelled far, gambled long and had, we were told, a child by Rex Harrison. Not a bad family record.

  Fraser and Adeline would occasionally leave Nan in charge of the children and go to Ireland where they became ‘Josh’ and ‘Bang’ again. There are some exuberant pictures of these holidays with the Corbet sisters, showing them on bridges and rocks against a waterfall or the sea, then in woods with their bicycles and in jaunting carts with horses. And there is one of Josh in his three-piece suit and watch chain, a pipe in his mouth, jumping high in the air. He loved these trips to Ireland and was thinking of buying a house called Greystones near Minnie and Tom White at Bray.

  The family sometimes kept photographs but never letters and seldom postcards unless the pictures took their fancy. There is one postcard from this period, kept because the picture was drawn and coloured in by my Aunt Yolande. Written from Brocket, a large, newly-built house at Maidenhead into which the family moved in 1912, it was posted to her mother in Ireland. It tells of an air balloon which ‘came right over our house. Nanny was so excited and called Yolande so many times that I thought the house was on fire.’ The card is addressed to 8 Prince of Wales Terrace, Bray, and was probably written early in 1914 when Josh still had ideas of moving to Ireland. But the Great War changed his plans, and a little later Tom and Minnie White came instead to live near Maidenhead.

  They came with one of Minnie’s sisters, Lannie (my father’s favourite aunt) whose husband went off to Australia to make his fortune. He took with him their second son who prospered there and before long was employing his father; but he left in Ireland their elder son who did rather well in the IRA before, things getting too hot for him, he joined his father as a fellow-employee in his brother’s Australian business. Lannie’s daughter Joan, the youngest child, went with her to Maidenhead and was my father’s chief companion in these war years. ‘She was certainly closer to me than my own brother and sister,’ he writes. One thing they had in common was a lack of confidence. Waiting for the fortune her father never made in Australia and for the call to join him that never seemed to arrive, Joan grew up as a poor relation wearing the cast-off clothes of her cousins, all of whom she hated ‘except perhaps myself’, my father adds.

  *

  The happiest days of my father’s life ‘were certainly those between the ages of five and eight – before I was sent to school’, he wrote. ‘I was spoilt by the old Nurse, had a small companion to play with and few worries. Exciting things happened too.’ On good days he and Joan would play together among the flashing birds, amazing fish and small animals at Datchet. On bad days the two of them used to be dragged out from their hiding places and sent together to
dancing class, Basil shamefully dressed in black velveteen knickers ‘which showed every mark if one slid around on the floor for a few happy minutes’, Joan in some frock that Yolande or one of her other cousins had discarded. Basil knew how she felt as he had inherited his brother’s rotten toys.

  Far better were their games outdoors such as drinking a special brew from an old tin and being tremendously sick. Joan often came to play at Brocket. The gardens there were ‘the nicest part of all’, my father wrote. They were laid out in three tiers with a drop of six feet between them, like a giant’s staircase, and made a magical playground. Along the back of the house ran a stone-paved terrace and against its wall were apricots, nectarines and peaches facing southwards to the sun. The top level of the garden next to the house was the adults’ play area, which is to say it was largely occupied by a grass tennis court, several formal rosebeds and three willow trees overlooking the second garden below. Flanking the tennis lawn, descending pathways followed the line of two boundary walls against which grew fig, pear and plum trees. On the second level lay the kitchen garden, its fruit and vegetables arranged in big squares and with a central path arched with apple trees that joined two curving flights of steps to the third level. Here stood three long hothouses crammed with black and white grapes and exotic flowers. At this lowest level there were also chicken houses with some fifty chickens wandering in and out of the potting shed, garage and coal yard with its wonderful mountain of black coal, perfect for climbing.

  These gardens at Brocket ‘were as good as many of the walled gardens in large country houses’, my father wrote. From ‘asparagus to onions, from gooseberries to quinces we had it all!’ He especially liked the black, red and white cherries that gave their fruit in rotation and ‘could have fed a small army of children’. Nevertheless he and his brother would sometimes balance themselves on the top of the potting shed and, using a butterfly net mounted on a long bamboo rod, steal some of the horribly sour cooking apples from the garden next door. ‘It is the only intimate thing I ever remember doing with my brother as a small boy unless you can count watching my father start the car on Sundays.’

  Compared with Kenneth who was a massive three, almost a monumental four, years older, and Yolande who, being a year older still, was almost an adult, Basil seemed a Richmal Crompton urchin-child. But he was happy. He had his own tomboy friend Joan and he lived in a secure and exciting world until the war – not the Great War, but that ‘war of my own’ which was fought out at his preparatory school.

  Scaitcliffe School had been founded in the early eighteen-eighties by the Reverend Doctor Charles Crosslegh. He chose its rather perilous name after his seventeenth-century family house in Lancashire, taking out a ninety-nine-year lease on Crown land near Windsor Park in which to start a cramming establishment for prospective candidates to the Royal Indian Engineering College. Twenty-five years later it had been bought by Ronald Vickers, a classical scholar who, turning his back on the family armaments and engineering business, converted Scaitcliffe into a boys’ preparatory school for Eton, Charterhouse, Wellington and other prominent public schools. His family was wealthy – several of them had been painted by John Singer Sargent – and he ran a private school ‘because he liked doing it’, my father observed. By the time Basil arrived in 1917 the school had some forty boys and was very much a Vickers family enterprise.

  My father’s difficulties at Scaitcliffe were largely caused, he felt, by his brother. Kenneth had actually left the term before Basil arrived, but his reputation stayed on. He had been a great success: doing wonderful things on the cricket and football pitches, excelling as an intrepid diver into the school plunge, performing miracles in the gym and, despite only scraping into the lowest form at Eton, gaining the approbation of the headmaster. This was not easy. Ronald Vickers was ‘a remote austere figure, despite his underlying care and interest’, his son Richard admits in the school history. ‘…Discipline was extremely strict.’ Except for his academic record, Kenneth ‘was everything I wasn’t!’ my father exclaimed. ‘At first my life was absolute hell. I was scared stiff of the bigger boys and when frightened I talked my head off instead of being quiet. I was the butt of the school bullies. My locker was ransacked, my belongings stolen.’

  This glimpse of rampageous school life differs from the picture of an extended family presented in the school history. There is no illustration in this book of the most visible Scaitcliffe master, Edgar Ransome (nicknamed Rampoo), but there is a fine description of him which contrasts rather dramatically with my father’s boy’s-eye view at the age of ten. Richard Vickers writes:

  Despite his great size – he weighed over 20 stone – he was a slow bowler of considerable skill who regularly attended nets each morning of the summer term. He was also a fine amateur pianist, whose rollicking songs were always an amusing interlude on winter evenings. His class presence was truly formidable, so woe-betide any boy who was slow to learn his tables or whose writing strayed from the line during copy-book exercises.

  Certainly he must have had a lasting effect on my father whose writing never strayed from the line until his final illness. Ransome was the junior form master at Scaitcliffe for twenty-six years before retiring to be a tobacconist in Basingstoke. To cover his bald head he always wore a cap, and became ‘pre-eminent’ among the ‘great characters of the school’s early years’. But my father greatly feared and disliked him. ‘I never quite understood how Ransome got a job at Scaitcliffe,’ he wrote.

  He was a particularly coarse old man with a large stomach and a big fleshy hooked nose from the end of which hung a permanent dew drop. He couldn’t even speak correctly, so heaven knows why [Ronald] Vickers, a purist, came to engage him.

  One of my worst recollections of Scaitcliffe was being made to stand in the corridor for bad behaviour. Should Vickers happen to come along the culprit got six sharp cuts with the cane. Edgar Ransome, who took the lowest class of very small boys, loved to inflict this form of punishment. His classroom was opposite Vickers’s Study door, so the unfortunates were particularly vulnerable.

  Basil could not wait for the holidays. During the war, the family spent more time at Brocket, but because of school he was seeing less of Joan. By the age of twelve his best friend had become his dog, a mongrel officially named Pat whom he called ‘Woorah’ – ‘I don’t know why.’ Looking back at this period he was to write: ‘I loved my dog dearly but did nothing for him. Nan [Kate Griffin] fed, sometimes bathed and generally looked after all our animals. My contribution was to reckon up how long he could live and imagine there would be no world for me when he died. And now I can’t even remember how he died or when.’ Knowing as I do his last solitary years with his dog, this passage has for me an almost Johnsonian tone of self-recrimination.

  My father’s last year at Scaitcliffe was more tolerable. Memories of his glamorous elder brother were receding and he himself was a bigger boy now – not someone who could easily be bullied or have his locker ransacked. He was playing cricket and football not too badly. He had escaped from Ransome’s form and there were fewer beatings. He had even learnt when to be quiet and not talk his head off. ‘I wasn’t too unhappy,’ he concluded. ‘I kept out of the way.’

  I have no photographs of my father at Scaitcliffe, only one of a school group taken in the grounds shortly before he arrived, with my Uncle Kenneth standing eyes half-closed in the back row, and the formidably handsome Ronald Vickers seated at the centre, the solitary adult, with a cricket ball in his hand: an intimidating figure.

  *

  Between the ages of seven and eleven my father didn’t notice the Great War much. The same seemed to hold true for Fraser. His brother Pat, having been transferred to a regular battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1915, made his Will and went off to fight in France. By 1917 he was back with the reserve battalion and retired after the war while in his forties. It was said in the family that he suffered, this amiable man, from shell-shock and that this was aggravated by domestic warf
are. Certainly his career was modest by the standards of the two major-generals, his father and father-in-law, and he seems to have been a disappointment to his wife Coral who, according to my father, taught both their children (in particular their son Ivor) to despise him.

  Coral already despised Fraser who took no part in the Great War allegedly on account of his varicose veins. So how, apart from fathering his three children and being ‘of independent means’, did my grandfather occupy himself in the first twenty-five years of his marriage before the big disaster?

  At the beginning he seems to have had a notion of taking up the law. On 22 November 1899, some seven months after his marriage, he entered Gray’s Inn (where George Sowley Holroyd had been admitted the previous century), enrolling at the private college run by the Bar Council. The Register of King’s College, Cambridge, has a note of his studentship, and the Uppingham School Roll notes that he went on to qualify as a barrister. Actually he took no law examinations but shortly after the death of his first son he left the college to look after Adeline.

  Over the next fifteen years he seems to have done very little but look after Adeline. She needed looking after – indeed she insisted on it. All the children could see what was going on. Their mother got more attention at home than any of them did. She was their rival. Whenever she didn’t get her own way, she would have violent hysterics – like firework displays they were – and Fraser, who was a naïve and kindly man, was pricked with self-reproach. For he had really married the Corbet family, and the barometer of his happiness shot up whenever he was among them en masse. Bang wasn’t allowed any of her tantrums when her sisters were around – they teased her too much. ‘What’s the difference between a man and an umbrella?’ her sister Lizzie called out at one of Bang’s bridge parties. All the card players stopped and looked up. ‘Really, Lizzie, whatever are you talking about?’ Bang answered. ‘I’m sure I don’t know.’